Tuesday June 28, 11am - 12:30pm. DC 1304. (Note this event is not in the FLEX Lab)
Group Response Systems (clickers) are wireless response pads used by
individual students to anonymously answer a given question. Their
responses are then aggregated and displayed by the instructor to
provide immediate feedback about class understanding of a particular
question.
Although vendors claim increased student participation, engagement and
performance, there has been little research on GRS impact on learning.
Three Professors from UW's School of Accountancy studied the effect of
GRS on student learning and satisfaction in accounting education. Come
and hear Carla Carnaghan, Alan Webb and Tony Atkinson speak about their
research findings, their experiences using GRS, and watch them
demonstrate the technology.
Please RSVP to peter@LT3.uwaterloo.ca (Peter Goldsworthy, LT3).
For background reading, visit
Teaching with the Personal Response System to Enhance Lectures and Engage Students
Speaker: Richard Rogers, Faculty Advisor to the Provost for
Undergraduate Education and Professor of Resource Economics, University
of Massachusetts Amherst
Professor Rogers has been teaching with PRS in his Intro Stats courses
for the past seven years where his enrollments have grown beyond 300
students per course. His course data show that PRS can improve overall
average student satisfaction, participation, performance, and
attendance; although he emphasizes that PRS should not be used to take
attendance but to increase attendance and decrease passive attendance
by improving lectures. The key remains the quality of the lectures and
thus the quality of the PRS questions you ask is paramount. He also
reminds us that there are no magic bullets as PRS cannot turn a poor
class into a good class and no single teaching tool appeals to all
students. The use of PRS adds costs to the students, to the instructor
in added administrative tasks, and to the institution, but he finds it
has allowed him to enhance active learning, better engage his students,
and adjust his lectures on the fly even in very large lecture
settings.
Find 50 pages of calculus questions of the GoodQuestions project (Cornell) on the page "Learning and teaching with online systems" in the "Lessons" folder at
Doug Duncan's book Clickers in the Classroom 2005, is also enthusiastic. The first two chapters are online.
Professor Ducan is Director of Astronomical Laboratories (including
Fiske Planetarium and the Sommers Bausch Observatory) of the Department
of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado,
and previously served as National Education Coordinator of the American
Astronomical Society and as a commentator on National Public Radio.