Optimising Student Response Systems for Feedback and Higher-order Thinking in Mathematics

Con Lozanovski (1) , Patrick Tobin (1)

1 ACU - Australian Catholic University

Active teaching and learning technologies such as Student Response Systems have seen wide application in higher education over recent decades. This technology boasts a list of potential advantages such as enhancing the student experience and engagement in challenging subjects like mathematics. One of these advantages is immediate feedback for both the students and teaching staff. For students, this feedback is displayed during the lecture in the form of bar-charts allowing individuals to gauge their understanding of materials relative to the entire class in total anonymity. On the other hand, teaching staff can gauge the progress of the class at key intervals of the lecture with the ability to address misconceptions through discussion. Usually, this is the extent to which feedback is used with no recording stored for later analysis. However, there may be instances that necessitate more than brief discussion within a lecture period. It is crucial to both recognise these occurrences and have in place a procedure to subsequently deal with the misconceptions. We propose such a procedure, based on student response times and statistical outcomes, which dynamically composes and focuses subsequent tutorial classes. An in-class example is given that illustrates the approach.

Mots clés: Student Response Systems; Clickers; Feedback; Higher-order Thinking; Mathematics Education; Tutorials; Lectures

Domaines: Environnements Informatiques pour l'Apprentissage Humain; Education

Con Lozanovski, Patrick Tobin. Optimising Student Response Systems for Feedback and Higher-order Thinking in Mathematics. 2013. ⟨hal-00866662v3⟩