sontimalonti 's List: PRS

• he main pedagogic categories of use of the equipment are:
• ormative and as practice for summative assessment.
• Assessment,
• feedback cycle here takes about two minutes per item
• Any kind of MCQ may be used, provided the response is a single selection from a small fixed set: whether the usual rather shallow item, or one designed to probe understanding more than information retention (possibly by prior use of phenomenography
• Formative feedback on learning within a class
• o map the common misconceptions).
• • This I instigated for public speaking assignments in past, also used by Student Union - sometimes ppl reluctant about the public aspect but I don't see why they should - we do judge, and students know this. 
• Formative feedback to the teacher
• a quick on the spot anonymous poll half way through a class (e.g. on whether the pace is too fast or too slow, the jokes too numerous or infrequent, the examples too many or few)
• Peer assessment could be done on the spot
• For example if each student has to give a verbal presentation and this is peer assessed, then at the end of their talk the teacher can display (say) each of 10 criteria in turn, and get the other students to enter their mark for this anonymously but on the spot, with the totals displayed.
• Community mutual awareness building
• having the distribution of responses displayed. For example, at a research meeting start by asking people's ages (which illustrates the advantage of anonymity), and the kind of department or institution they come from, and some alternative reasons for attending. At the start of a class, I might ask whether each student is straight from school or not, their gender, which faculty they belong to, whether they signed up for the course because it is their main interest, a side interest, or are just making up the number of courses they do
• Experiments using human responses
• • Well that's hardly fair: you are not necessarily aligned with an indiscriminately positive attitude. 
• is in using the equipment to initiate a discussion.
• Possibly the most productive application, however, and the one with the largest body of existing research,
• Having to produce explanations and reasons is powerfully "mathemagenic" (conducive to learning), which of course is why researchers learn so much from giving talks and writing papers, and why teachers make their students write essays and answer questions. The equipment can be a significant help in introducing this, even into large classes.
• re now many people whose job is essentially this and who are therefore necessarily aligned with this indiscriminately positive attitude,
• that most applications showed no significant improvements over what they replaced, but that the few striking positive exceptions were characterised by "niche-based design": by a good fit between a particular learning situation and a specific technical solution.
• each application should be carefully justified.
• this situation fails to support the iterative interaction between learner and teacher that is one of her underlying principles, and more specifically does not support even activity
• • tracking student record across a course, ie over ten weeks also progress and advantage over showing hands. 
• That, then, is the diagnosis offered here of the chief weakness of lecturing to large groups.
• his contingency (dependence of the teacher's behaviour on what the learners do) is true interactivity:
• Formative, summative, and peer assessment could be made more convenient and quicker (and so more affordable for both learners and teachers in terms of time).
• Starting to build a sense of a learning community could get off to a quicker start, especially in large groups
• The biggest learning gains, however, are likely to come from the much better and quicker feedback from learners to teachers, allowing better attunement of the delivery;
• and from the method of teaching by questions i.e. of discussions in class (whether in small groups, plenaries, or a combination) initiated by well designed questions and by getting each individual to start by committing to an initial position.
• hus the electronic equipment offers somewhat better privacy, but the difference may only be crucial with new classes: it is quite possible that with a class grown comfortable with the electronic version, moving over to a cheaper but less private version might not destroy the interactivity. The electronic version also provides faster and more accurate counting of the results:
• In scrutinising this instructional design rationale, note that it does not feature computers in a starring role (although actually one is crucial to tabulate the results): the instructional design mostly isn't in the equipment or software, but in how each teacher uses it.
• There is a considerable history and community of practice in using such equipment in the specific area of promoting discussion (the last of the pedagogic uses listed above) and so improving student understanding in science and engineering at the school and early university levels (e.g. Hake 1998a, 1998b).
• When asked if they regard the interactive equipment as an advantage or not, classes typically show a spread of opinion such as 70% for it, 20% indifferent, 10% definitely opposed to it. Investigating more deeply than general student preferences will require more, and more sophisticated, measures.
• On the other hand, if we believe in the Laurillard model, then the important factor would probably be the amount of time each learner spends on activity 2 ("re-expression"): so using the handsets should be better than a non-interactive monologue, but not as good as time spent in peer discussion

• Hake,R.R. (1998a) "Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses" Am.J.Physics vol.66 no.1 pp.64-74

    Hake,R.R. (1998b) "Interactive-engagement methods in introductory mechanics courses" submitted to J.of Physics Education Research
• Marton,F. (1981) "Phenomenography -- describing conceptions of the world around us" Instructional Science vol.10 pp.177-200.

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• Using a Personal Response System in Economics Teaching
• During a 50-minute lecture I would punctuate my delivery by asking approximately five multiple-choice questions, to which the students would reply using their handsets.
• aware that it was a course that students have historically often found challenging.
• used the PRS questions as a means of anonymously testing students’ understanding of material recently covered
• another motivation for introducing the PRS was to break the lecture into segments using an activity that periodically required the students to respond, and thereby varying students’ lecture learning experience.
• t has long been recognised that the lecture environment often fosters passive learning.
• Hake (1998) reports on the adoption of a PRS in physics teaching, concluding that it can have a significant impact on students’ problem-solving skills, this being reflected in significantly improved test results.
• I can confirm that the PRS has provided a very useful means of checking students’ understanding of material covered, both quickly in the lectures and also after the lecture.
• potential drawback is that less material can be covered in lectures.
• PRS has enabled me to relate the pace of my presentation of material more closely to the pace of student understanding
• not only was I aware that using the PRS improved students’ alertness, but also the vast majority of students recognised that their concentration levels improved when using the technology. Unfortunately, it cannot be deduced to what extent this reflects greater active learning or the changes in stimuli received during lectures
• A number of students felt it necessary to add qualifying comments to their responses to this statement. These comments all expressed the view that they felt much less confident about using the PRS when it was in the named mode, such that I could check their individual answers by inspecting the results file
• PRSs offer an innovative method of maintaining student interest and concentration, enhancing active learning and the level of interaction in a lecture setting, whilst allowing students as well as lecturers an opportunity to monitor the level of student understanding.
• Attention has to be given both to developing questions that will test students’ understanding of lecture material, and to incorporating these questions successfully in a lecture context. Further, the lecturer must be willing to revisit material if the PRS results suggest that lecture material has not been well understood by a majority of the students.
• Although I have found that a PRS may be easily adopted as a teaching method for theoretical and quantitative material in economics as well as other subjects, the value of its use in more discursive and contentious subjects remains to be explored. In such contexts it may instead be used to encourage debate, with students initially asked to select a multiple-choice answer most closely corresponding to their personal views.

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• Increasing interactivity in lectures using an electronic voting system
• An overview of the experience of the opening two years of an institution-wide project in introducing electronic voting equipment for lectures is presented.
• The initiative includes an organizational change dimension: its eventual aim is not merely to look at the effect on learning in one context, but to explore both use and adoption across a whole university.
• Thus this paper focusses on the overall aims and generalisable conclusions, rather than all the evidence in particular cases.

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