The Active Class

As I’m gearing up to teach a summer physics course for non-majors, I’m thinking of a variety of things that I might do to engage this set of students in the wonder of the physical world.  But how to hook them into things that might seem boring on the surface, such as the electromagnetic spectrum?

I’ll be using a variety of techniques, such as driving questions for each module, clicker questions, hands-on activities, and observations of the natural world.  But one that I’m planning to make better use of is video and movie clips to inspire curiosity and investigation.

Movies add real visual impact to a presentation, but even better, they make use of the power of narrative to hook students in.  And when used cleverly, they can be great jumping-off points for a lecture topic.  Here are a few possible uses of videos:

1.  Illustrate a concept

This is probably the most common use of video, but is my least favorite.  Why?  This is akin to the type of boring undergraduate lab that serves only to confirm what we’ve known for hundreds of years — e.g., that a block of wood slides down a smooth metal ramp more quickly than it does a wooden ramp.  These so-called “confirmation” labs offer no opportunity for creativity.  Similarly, a video that only serves to illustrate what the instructor has been discussing is often kind of a “no-duh” moment.  Now, there can be a time and place for illustrative videos, as in the case of a video that does a remarkable job of providing a visual depiction of an abstract concept, or a surprising implication of a concept.  But overall, I prefer the use of video to lead into a topic.

2.  Create a “need to know”

What about using videos to generate questions, and a “need to know”?   For example, one astronomy instructor I know (Ed Prather) shows a video clip that discusses how zebras’ black and white stripes absorb different amounts of light energy, and poses the question of whether the white stripes or black stripes will show up as bright in an infrared camera image.  It’s an interesting question, since the white stripes reflect more light, but the black stripes absorb more to begin with.  But then he stops the video before the infrared image is shown.  The students’ curiosity is piqued, and they’re interested in knowing the results.  He uses this as an opportunity to delve into a discussion activity about the topic of infrared light, absorption, and reflection.  The zebra story serves as a motivator for this activity, and a concrete referent that students can keep in mind while learning about the abstract ideas.  Then they come back to the video to see if they can correctly predict the outcome using what they’ve learned.  Note that the same video could have been used in a very different way, to simply illustrate the ideas after they’d been presented in class.  Do you see why I consider such “illustrative” use of video to be a potentially missed opportunity?

Vacuum tube. I wonder.... what this is used for?

3.  Inquiry starters:  Phenomenon-based learning

We often start a topic, at least in the sciences, by outlining the background of the topic, creating a simple picture, and building up an understanding of something complex.  But what about starting with the complex, interesting thing, and then gaining the tools to understand that complex idea through a variety of activities?  You might show students an object, picture, or video of something a little confusing or curious and ask them to generate a series of “I wonder” questions.  In the sciences, this could be achieved with many existing YouTube or other videos of interesting phenomena by simply turning off the sound, leaving students to view the phenomena without hearing the explanation.  These “I wonder” ques

tions can then be used to lead into activities or lecture, tailored to students’ innate curiosity and questions.  They can also be used to generate inquiry questions for a laboratory or other hands-on activity, providing authentic motivation for students to explore a phenomenon.  For example, a video showing a levitating superconducting magnet could lead into questions such as “is the magnet cold?”  “What kind of material is that?”  “Will it still float if you put a piece of paper between the two magnets?”  These questions could be used to generate inquiry activities about magnets and superconducting magnets.

4.  Video demonstrations and experiments

What if you would like a large class to be able to engage in meaningful inquiry and debate, but there is no associated lab?  One method that is gaining popularity is to use a video demonstration or experiment broken into two pieces — the experimental setup, and the final outcome.  The first part of the video is shown to set up the experiment and the question about the outcome.  Students then work together to predict what they think the outcome of the demo or experiment will be.  In this way, the video serves as a jumping-off point for whole-class inquiry.  Then, after students have worked through their predictions, the end part of the video is shown.  Much research shows that this type of predict-then-show approach to in-class demonstrations and experiments is much more effective than simply showing the demonstration.  Note that you can achieve this same sort of benefit through simulations (such as the PhET simulations) by setting up a virtual experiment and asking students to predict the outcomes.

5.  What, if anything, is wrong?

Hollywood is great at making things flashy, but are they always good at making things right?  Of course not.   This, again, is particularly useful for the sciences.  There are a few great sites, such as Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, Bad Astronomy Movies, or The Good and Bad in Sci-Fi, where you can get great ideas for video clips of good or bad science.  These can be great little puzzlers for students to figure out whether what is shown is possible or not.

So, happy movie-watching, and here are a few resources to help you out:

1. Downloading videos from YouTube.  If you can’t be live on the net, here are some tools to download videos for offline viewing.
2. MovieClips.com.   An extensive (12,000 and growing) catalog of short video scenes from a variety of films.  In developing the site, Movieclips’ founders have worked collaboratively with Hollywood studios and are therefore able to provide high quality, free, and legal video clips.  Movieclips offers a powerful search function that allows you to find scenes by actor, title, genre, character type, mood, and even dialogue.
3. TeacherTube.  This community-based website provides free educational videos, suggested and rated by a broad teacher community.
4. Teachers’ Domain.  Teachers’ Domain is a free digital media service for educational use from public broadcasting and its partners. You’ll find thousands of media resources, support materials, and tools for classroom lessons, individualized learning programs, and teacher professional learning communities.
5. National Science Digital Library.  This free digital repository of media for educational use includes a search by audio/visual media, subject, and grade level.
6. NOVA Education. This free digital library is tied to teaching standards and includes video, audio segments, interactives, and much more.

Image by Vrysxy on Wikimedia

How can a teacher use clickers to maximize student learning?  What are some of the “best practices” that lead to success?  While there is no magic bullet or recipe for making clickers work for you, there are a few things that will probably help maximize the impact of clickers in the classroom.  I recently wrote up a short tip-sheet, geared at K12 teachers.  You can download the PDF Tip-Sheet and share it with your colleagues, and the text of that handout is below.

—–

7 Clicker Tips for Teachers

Effective Use of Classroom Response Systems (“Clickers”)

“Clickers” are electronic devices that allow for real-time polling—often with multiple choice questions. They offer you and your students an instant display of the students’ responses. Use of clickers can help your students to learn key concepts, improve their enjoyment of class time, and let you (the teacher) better gauge what they are ready to learn.

But clickers are not a magic bullet!

The following factors hugely impact how clickers play out in your classroom: the way that you use clickers, the kinds of questions you pose, and the type of classroom structure you use. Listed below are some key strategies—based on research and experience—on how to make sure students get the most out of your use of clickers.

Go beyond quizzes.

While it’s tempting to use clickers as a quick fact-check of student learning, this is just one potential use. As you gain expertise, you’ll find that sprinkling clicker questions throughout class can:

-        Motivate and drive student learning

-        Develop students’ ability to communicate and explain their thinking

-        Help students become more aware of what is difficult for them

-        Help you adjust your teaching according to student feedback

Think of the wide range of questions you already ask your students on the fly (e.g., to get them to draw on their personal experience or get them to connect what they’re learning to the bigger picture). With some careful thought, most of your existing questions can be used with clickers.

Get your students talking.

Students learn more from clicker questions when they have a chance to discuss and debate the questions with one another, before casting their final vote and participating in a whole-class discussion. This method of teaching, called “peer instruction”, helps students to clarify their thinking, and allow students with a stronger grasp of the material to explain the material at a level more easily understood by their peers. Even if students do not arrive at the “right” answer, this discussion is valuable to students to help them to articulate and clarify their thinking. Of course, in order for peer instruction to be successful, the questions must be both challenging and interesting – if students aren’t curious about the answer to the question, or have no trouble answering it on their own, then why discuss it?

Use questions that challenge student thinking.

The limitations of understanding are revealed only when it is applied. Questions that are too simple, or just ask students to recall basic facts, are less useful than questions which challenge students’ ability to explain key ideas. Carefully chosen questions, including distracters based on common misconceptions, can call students’ attention to gaps in their understanding. Questions about which even well-prepared students can disagree, and generate discussion about the reasoning behind the answers (rather than “you know it or you don’t” questions), or even questions without a clear right answer, can yield a stronger understanding of the material.

Mix up your questions.

It’s important to use clickers frequently and to ask a wide variety of types of questions.  Simple questions give students a chance to feel successful; challenging questions push them to stretch their thinking (and help target the top-level of the class).  Consider a wide variety of question strategies to assess what students know about a topic, provoke thinking about something new, predict an outcome, stimulate discussion with a disputable question, or survey your students about their beliefs or experience.  Looking at existing question banks or working with colleagues is helpful as you learn to write questions.

The technology is not the pedagogy.

Nothing about this pedagogy requires the use of a clicker and low-tech options exist.  However, there are several benefits to the use of technology, including:  Anonymity, accountability, all students must commit to an answer, being able to hear from all students, accurate data on student responses that can be displayed to the class and archived for the future, and increased engagement and participation.  There is a definite benefit of students making an answer choice, in that they are more interested in the conversation in order to see how “their” answer holds up.  (We recom- mend giving little or no credit for correctness in order to encourage open discussion.)

Keep the mystery.

After students have voted, you hold a powerful tool in your hands; the results of the class voting.  Be savvy about when to show the histogram of student responses. Displaying these results often cuts short student thinking about the question (since they now feel they know the answer).  Use their curiosity to drive a rich whole-class discussion about the question, focusing on the reasoning behind the different answer choices. Then, once you are satisfied with student understanding of the question content, you can whip back the digital curtain to show how the class voted overall.

Start small.

Incorporating  clickers into your class is a process and does require some preparation.  Start with a few questions per class and gradually increase your use. Don’t be hard on yourself (or your students!) if things don’t work as you expect immediately.  Typically, teachers first concentrate on getting the technology working for them, then on creating good questions. Then they are able to work on more effectively facilitating the whole-class discussion and finally on using student responses to direct their teaching.  Experiment and discuss with other users. Talk to your students. Learn from them what they find helpful, and what they don’t like.  With time you can learn to flexibly integrate clickers into your teaching in a way that stimulates student learning and is an enjoyable part of class – for the students and for you.

—–

References:

While most formal studies have been done in the college setting, many of the best-practices in clicker use are drawn from the broad literature of what helps people learn, regardless of level.  Additionally, Penuel et al. have shown that K-12 teachers and college teachers approach clicker use in a similar manner.

1. The Peer Instruction Network can connect you to other new or experienced users: http://www.peerinstruction.net/

2. Literature on best-practices, videos, and question banks available at http://STEMclickers.colorado.edu

3. D. Duncan, “Tips for Successful ‘Clicker’ Use”, University of Colorado (2008).

4. Teacher Learning of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment Project (PI:  Ian Beatty), and associated publications:  http://ianbeatty.com/tefa

5. E. Mazur, Peer Instruction, a user’s manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall (1997).

6. W. Penuel et al., “Teaching with student response systems in elementary and secondary education settings:  A survey study,” Ed. Tech. Research Dev. (2006).

You can download the PDF Tip-Sheet and share it with your colleagues.

Clickers are a great way to get students thinking deeply about a topic, weighing the arguments and evidence for and against different multiple choice answers.  For example, here is a famous biology question that gets students to confront some deeply held misconceptions:

Many people — university instructors included — will often go for A) or B).  But trees get their substance from photosynthesis — taking in carbon from carbon-dioxide and converting it into mass.  So, the answer is C), and students will often put together a more correct understanding once they get a chance to talk to their neighbors about the question and think more deeply about the process.

But now, most clicker systems offer the ability for students to enter in their own answers, such as numbers and words — called alphanumeric entry – rather than responding to fixed multiple-choice answers.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of alphanumeric entry?

First, to fess up, I was always staunchly against alphanumeric entry clickers.  I had heard from the early beta testers at my university that such open-responses were a nightmare:  Ask students to input the answer to a calculation, and the instructor had to quickly scan over 200 entries to get a sense of the audience.  And to make matters worse, “2.0″ is read differently from “2″ or from “two”, making that visual scan nearly impossible.

But I’ve been changing my tune lately, as I’ve talked to instructors with a different view. Much of what I will write about today is taken from a presentation by Matt Evans, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin at Eu Claire.  In the abstract for his talk, Moving from Multiple Choice to Alphanumeric Clickers (American Association of Physics Teachers meeting in Ontario, CA in February) he opines:

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I say that unexamined clicker use is not worth using.

So, with that in mind, let’s examine the possible advantages and uses of alphanumeric entry.

Use #1:  Ranking

I love asking students to rank-order different choices.  But this is cumbersome at best with multiple-choice clickers, leading to horrible answer choices such as BA) 1>2>3, (B) 3>1>2, etc.  Matt gave a few examples of excellent ranking tasks:

Instead of asking:

The highest temperature is:    (A)  0 F   (B)  0 C    (C)  50 C  (D) 100 F   (E) 300K

Instead ask students:

Rank the temperatures from lowest to highest:    (A)  0 F   (B)  0 C    (C)  50 C  (D) 100 F   (E) 300K

This forces students to consider all answers, rather than only needing some limited information to get the right answer.  Matt suggests giving students a visual of the right answer at the end of discussion, since the correct ranking using just the letters (in this case, ABEDC) is hard to parse.

Another nice example that he gave was using graphical analysis:

Use #2:  Choose all that are appropriate / More than one right answer

Again, with multiple choice clickers, if you ask students to choose more than one item in a list, the answer choices become quite clunky. Here is an example from Matt’s talk:

And here is the “reformed” version:

One question I like to use in workshops is the following, but you could only do this with alphanumeric entry:

Use #3:  Avoid “priming” the right answer

Oftentimes, there is something tricky about a problem or a question, but if you show the correct answer in a list of choices, then students will recognize it as correct.  But this doesn’t mean that they could generate the answer on their own.  For example, Matt uses this question with his students:

What is the average velocity?

The answer in this case is velocity = displacement / time = -3 m/s.  Many students will recognize that the negative sign is important if they see it in a list, but may miss it if they have to generate the answer on their own (or on the final exam).

Which leads us to another use of alphanumeric entry:

Use #4:  Numerical Answers

I’d approach this particular use with caution.  We’ve found that when you ask students a numerical calculation question, then they turn to their calculators and work individually.  But the point of using clickers, especially if you’re using it with Peer Instruction, is to get students engaged and discussing the questions with their classmates.  But still, sometimes it can be useful to have students input their own answer rather than giving them a choice of answers.

One item that Matt didn’t cover that I think is another really useful application of alphanumeric entry:

Use #5:  Generate answers for multiple choice

One of the questions that instructors ask me a lot is, “where do you find the tempting distractors for multiple choice questions?”  While one good answer to that question is to pore through your old student exams and homework for common errors, an even easier way is to give students a question as an open-ended question, and then use common responses for next semester’s multiple-choice version of the question.

Drawbacks

Of course, there are drawbacks, as Matt admits:

1. Time. It takes longer to cover these in class, both for students to vote, and for the instructor to discuss the answers with the class.  So, you can’t do as many open-ended questions in a class as you can multiple choice.
2. Harder to grade or assess. This is especially true if you’re giving points for correctness, which is a common practice (but needs to be done sparingly, to not shut down student conversation).
3. Harder to get instant feedback from students. A corollary of the above, it’s tougher to scan student responses and get a quick idea of where the majority of the class is.
4. More complicated to enter. It’s logistically more challenging for students to input this data, but Matt says that his students don’t seem to mind it.

But overall, I admit, I’d like to try alphanumeric entry questions.  They offer a richer opportunity for discussion and student critical thinking, though they’re certainly no magic bullet.

On Thursday, the Transforming Education through Technology (THE) Journal is hosting a webinar (supported by i>clicker) on the effective use of clickers in K12 classrooms.

• When:  12:00 pm Pacific Time / 3pm Eastern Time
• Date:  Thursday, March 15th
• Registration:  Link here

Classroom response systems (“clickers”) offer a powerful way to increase student engagement by going beyond simple quizzes. They provide an opportunity for peer instruction as students discuss challenging conceptual questions with their classmates, giving teachers and students an opportunity to get real-time feedback on student understanding through these conversations and the histogram created by student voting.

Clickers enable more interaction between students and faculty in classroom learning situations. Instructors use this type of response system to present questions interspersed throughout a presentation, receiving immediate feedback about student skills and knowledge. Clickers may also be used for attendance, quizzes, labs, group activities, and more.

Join this webinar on March 15th to hear how the University of Colorado at Boulder utilized i>clicker remotes to:

• quickly and easily collect instant feedback
• encourage interactive classroom engagement to increase understanding
• differentiate instruction to address diverse needs

——-

Handouts and slides

For those of you joining the webinar, you may want to download the:

• Handouts (1.1 MB PDF)
• Slides (2.5 MB PDF)

Peer Instruction — a method of using clickers to engage students by having them discuss the questions with their peers before discussing as a whole class — has become extremely popular in a wide range of disciplines and courses. Visit the Physics Education Research User’s Guide here to see more about Peer Instruction. But instructors typically hear about peer instruction through word of mouth, at conferences or by hearing a talk, and don’t always have a lot of support at their home institution to learn how to implement it well.  And the research shows that this lack of support leads to a lot of instructors trying the technique; and then dropping it; a real shame since research also shows how much it can improve student learning.

But that might be changing.  One of the inventors of Peer Instruction, Eric Mazur, has now launched a new Peer Instruction Network, at www.peerinstruction.net.  The site is still being populated and reaching full functionality, but already has more than 2000 registrants.  The postdoc working on building out the site writes:

• 441 registrants report having ConcepTests that they have developed in their disciplines.
• More than 700 users have asked questions about Peer Instruction, and 1200 have written testimonials about their interest or experience with PI.
• Users from a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to) physics, law, biology, chemistry, psychology, mathematics, engineering, astronomy, information systems, computer science, measurement, project management, pharmacy, english, statistics, real estate, sociology, nursing, political science, theology, history, art, and foreign languages.

We are still working to register more users as we continue to build out the full site, including the ability to locate and connect with users in your school, organization, or discipline.

So, if you’re using Peer Instruction, or are curious about it, consider signing up for the network.

Here is the text from a press release released by Harvard on the new network:

The Peer Instruction Network, a new global social site for interactive teaching, launches at Harvard

CONTACT: Michael Rutter, (617) 496-3815

Cambridge, Mass. – February 8, 2012 – Researchers at Harvard University have launched the Peer Instruction (PI) Network (www.peerinstruction.net), a new global social network for users of interactive teaching methods.

PI, developed by Eric Mazur, Area Dean for Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is an innovative evidence-based pedagogy designed to improve student engagement and success.

Mazur, famous for his talk titled “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer,” developed the method after realizing in the 1990s that his physics lectures at Harvard, while popular, were not helping students to master the basic concepts.

The PI technique relies on the power of the “flipped classroom.” Information transfer (i.e., a teacher transferring knowledge to students) takes place in advance, typically through online lectures. In short, students study before rather than after class.

As a result, the classroom becomes a place for active learning, questions, and discussion. Instructors spend their time addressing students’ difficulties rather than lecturing.

While originally developed for Mazur’s introductory physics courses, PI is now used across multiple disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities.

The Peer Instruction Network will serve as a hub for educators around the world to connect and share their PI experiences, submit questions, and engage with other PI users.

“In the first phase of community building we are aiming to register current and potential users of Peer Instruction,” said Julie Schell, Co-Founder of the Peer Instruction Network and a senior education postdoctoral fellow in the Mazur Group at SEAS.

“So far, the response has been remarkable,” Schell said. “More than 1,900 educators from elementary schools to research universities worldwide, including those in Ethiopia, Israel, Singapore, Vietnam, Finland, Germany, Greece, South Africa, and places like South Dakota, New York City, New Orleans and Oklahoma, have joined the Network.”

Testimonials from network registrants suggest why PI is rapidly becoming a pedagogy of choice: It works.

A science professor wrote on the site: “I use the technique so extensively that I’ve moved my lectures from ‘live’ to video podcasts that the students view before coming to class. In-class ‘lecture’ time is now devoted to Peer Instruction, worksheets, and physics demonstrations. Works great!”

At Harvard, Mazur and his team have long been encouraging other faculty to experiment with Peer Instruction in their own courses. With support from Cherry A. Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), he has even used it to better engage faculty at faculty meetings and retreats.

“We are amazed by the response to the initial launch of the Peer Instruction Network,” said Mazur. “By connecting people who use interactive teaching methods, we hope to cultivate a community of practice that will have a global effect on educational change.”

I will be giving a webinar geared to K12 teachers next week, on Weds Feb 15th.  See details below for registration.

Make Clickers Work For You:  A powerful tool for instruction and formative assessment in K12 classrooms

Dr.Stephanie Chasteen
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
6:30 PM EST

We’ll show you how classroom response systems (“clickers”) offer a powerful way to increase student engagement by going beyond simple quizzes.  Challenging conceptual questions provide an opportunity for peer instruction as students discuss answers with their classmates, giving teachers a chance to hear student ideas and misconceptions by listening to their conversations.  The real-time histogram of students responses to these multiple-choice questions also provide instant feedback to both teachers and students as to the precise level of student understanding on that particular topic.  Clicker questions can also be posed before and after instruction, giving quantitative information about the effectiveness of a variety of types of instruction.  We’ll share ideas for question writing, give you practice to write your own questions and receive feedback, and provide a wealth of tips for facilitating class discussion and getting students to buy in to this teaching technique.

Register for the webinar

Handouts

I have a few handouts for the webinar, which may be useful.

1. Webinar handout packet
2. Tips for successful use of clickers
3. Bloom’s Taxonomy: List of verbs

blank

Slides

Below are the slides from the presentation for your reference.

Clickers are great ways to involve your class in what they’re learning.  I want to write about one type of clicker question that is particularly adept at enabling whole-class inquiry:  Clicker questions that engage students in an experiment or demonstration.  There are a few ways to do this, some which I find extraordinarily clever.

1.  Using clickers to predict the outcome of a demonstration.

This is pretty easy to do, and lots of research shows that students recall and understand demonstrations better if they’re first asked to consider what they think will happen.  This works particularly well with demonstrations that are intended to show “discrepant events” — something surprising or counter to intuition.   Many classroom teachers use a cycle called “predict-observe-explain” with such demonstrations, where students predict the outcome, observe the demonstration, and then work together to construct an explanation.    Clickers are especially well-suited to the “predict” portion of this cycle.

For example, here is a nice set of demos from Rhett Allain at Dot Physics many of which could be done using clickers.  One common demonstration is that of the Cartesian Diver, where an object that has some small air cavity in it is placed in a bottle.  When the bottle is squeezed, what will happen to the “diver”?  Will it go up, down, or not move?  That would be a great clicker question, especially if you embedded some reasoning into those answers.   Ie., “It goes up because XXX”, “It goes up because YYY,” “It goes down because ZZZ”, etc.

The answer?  It goes down, because, as Rhett explains, “When you squeeze the bottle, you increase the pressure in the liquid AND in the air in the diver. This makes the air bubble get smaller so that the diver displaces less water. The buoyancy force on the diver is equal to the weight of the water it displaces.”

Or, here’s an example from Eric Mazur, which could be easily tested using real equipment (left) and another one from Chemistry (origin unknown; right).

2.  Using clickers as an interactive lecture demonstration

A somewhat more structured way to use clickers with a demonstration is with interactive lecture demonstrations.  ILD’s are a more structured version of the predict-observe-explain cycle, and perhaps the only way that I really distinguish the two is that ILD’s are not always “surprising,” but often structured to help students see and apply particular concepts, usually in physics.  Below is an example.

Question via Shane Hutson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.

3.  Clicker questions based off simulations / clicker questions where students generate graphs or other predictions

But you can get creative with this type of question, too.  For one not all demonstrations need to be with real equipment.  Demonstration can be done with virtual equipment — the PhET Interactive Simulations are perfectly suited for this.

Second, you can have students generate their own answers, and then show the multiple choice version.

Here is an example from Kathy Perkins and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

First, they show students the Moving Man simulation, where a man will move in response to the input of initial position, velocity and acceleration.  Then, they have students generate their own graphs for a specific situation:

Then, they use common graphs to turn the students’ free-responses into a clicker question:



4.  Use clickers for real-time experiments on the students.

This works best in psychology classes, or some course where you want to demonstrate some fundamental aspect of human behavior.  One of the best ones that I’ve seen in this genre is listed below, which demonstrates our innate tendency to prefer immediate rewards.

5.  Use clickers to gather real-time data that students perform.

Sometimes having a few students performing a quick little experiment isn’t necessarily that compelling, but if you can aggregate data from the whole class then you have a powerful tool for demonstrating a principle or an outcome.  For example, if you want to demonstrate that flipping two coins results in a greater probability of getting a head and a tail than two heads or two tails, it’s pretty boring to have students sit there and do 50 coin flips to get a robust result.  But, if instead, you have each student do their own coin flip, and then click in with their results, you can get a real-time histogram that shows authentic data demonstrating that idea.

A fabulous article on using this technique with students to demonstrate the Monty Hall Problem (a nice statistics problem) was just published in The Physics Teacher. Students were able to perfectly replicate the theoretical prediction as a whole class, running the experiment in pairs.  It’s a free download, so check it out.

I gave a webinar this week to what shaped up to be a huge group (almost 500 registrants, a record for me!). This is my introduction to clickers and peer instruction talk. We’ve also hosted webinars  on writing clicker questions and effective facilitation techniques, but this webinar is my quick all-in-one overview.

There are two downloads

• Handouts.

• Slides.

You can also download the Instructor’s Guide to the Effective Use of Clickers, created by my group, for free at our resource page: http://STEMclickers.colorado.edu. Materials from our past workshops are there too, as well as outline materials you can use for your own clicker workshops.

Feel free to post questions or comments about the webinar in the comments section!

Since my last post on the Flipped Classroom, I’ve stumbled across enough particularly good resources on a similar topic to merit a follow-up post.  The idea behind the Flipped Classroom is that classtime is better spent in helping students to apply ideas (e.g., working problems, doing labs, or in other words making sense of the content) rather than in the traditional lecture content-delivery mode.  So, students watch mini recorded lectures at home to get the content, and then spend class time applying the ideas, with the teacher as a coach.  You can see more about this technique on the previous posts, or at Learning4Mastery. In this post, I will talk about ways to help students use pre-lecture time to adequately prepare for class — whether you’re using a flipped classroom model or not — and the research behind some of those techniques.

Have student reading habits changed?

It’s a common complaint:  Students don’t read the book before class.  It’s probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences.  Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it’s a real challenge for an introductory student to muddle their way through all that information to try to extract useful information from it.  So most don’t bother — they go to class to see what content the professor thinks is important, and then use the textbook to help them to do the homework and guide their exam studying.  But this constrains us to use class in content-delivery mode: If students don’t know the first thing about Newton’s Laws, then how can we do anything in class other than tell them about Newton’s Laws?

Do they read?

Some of my colleagues at CU Boulder studied how students use textbooks in introductory physics (Podolefsky and Finkelstein, “The Perceived Value of Textbooks: Students and instructors may not see eye to eye.” The Physics Teacher, 44, 6, 2006),     Noah Podolefsky, one of the study’s authors, summarizes it below (as quoted from a physics teacher listserv):

In a nutshell, what we found was that few students read the book before class, more student did read (but still not many). However, there was no correlation between reading habits and final grade.  We interviewed students and basically found that they had different strategies for
reading – some read straight through, some read in a non-linear way (going back and forth), some just read the summary. Some students didn’t use the book because they scoured the internet for resources that made more sense to them. We couldn’t find any consistent patterns that related reading habits to performance in the class.

From their data, he claims, it was not clear that encouraging students to read the textbook would have actually helped them.  There’s no correlation between reading the book and doing well in the class, and students are reading in so many different ways that it’s hard to say anymore what “reading” means.  Noah postulates:

I can speculate as to why textbooks are not read, and perhaps not that useful, which is that they aren’t very well designed tools for learning physics. They’re pretty good for re-learning physics if you already have a good framework (i.e., you’re an upper level physics major or grad). But they don’t match very well how new comers (intro students) learn.

I think that this is why we, as academics, get so frustrated when students don’t read.  This is how we learn a new topic — by reading a journal article or a book.  But we’re experts, and we can make sense of the information as it’s presented in the book.  But students are novices, and need more guidance.

So how can we provide that guidance?

One thing that some faculty have tried are multimedia modules to help guide your students in their pre-class preparation.  For example, the University of Illinois has created a suite of multimedia modules, about 10 minutes long, which each guide students through some of the main ideas in the text for a particular topic.   Students watch the videos before class, and take a short quiz on their content to encourage participation. Below are a few such resources that are available online, but please let me know of others that you’re aware of:

1. Physics: Multimedia Modules; 20-minute lessons with pictures and audio from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne.  Published work on effectiveness here.
2. Various science: Hippocampus. Short lessons on various topics from the Monterey Institute of Technology, including some recommended ones on physics.
3. Chemistry & Physics: Georgia Public Broadcasting.  Videos on science, recommended by a high school teacher.
4. Chemical Engineering: LearnChMe screencasts from CU-Boulder. A richly developed suite of materials on engineering topics.
5. Various science: Learning4Mastery website by Bergman and Sams covers high school chemistry, physics, earth science, astronomy, calculus, and biology, though their style is idiosyncratic and less easily incorporated into another class

text

Some other ways to guide students in their preparation are:

1. Skip the multimedia part and just record your own lectures (using, for example, Panopto).  See some examples of this in physics here and here.
2. Use pre-existing lectures such as MIT Open Courseware, or other lectures available on iTunesU.
3. Ask students a pre-lecture quiz, to encourage and guide the reading, or simply ask them what was confusing or what they don’t understand.  This can also guide you as the instructor as to what students are struggling with.  This is called Just in Time Teaching, or JiTT. The quiz can be multiple choice and graded in your course management system to reduce grading burden.
4. Have students write a brief summary of the reading, and a question that they have about the reading.

text

The research.

Of course, the big question is, does this stuff work? The answer is probably, as always, “it depends.”  There are few, if any, plug-and-play solutions in education.  How an instructor uses these resources, and coordinates them with the class time, is essential.  That said, here are the results of a few studies.

The UIUC multimedia modules have been studied for several years.  One way to look at the effectiveness is to look at a particular topic, and show students either the multimedia modules, or let them read the traditional textbook.  When they did this (Am. J. Phys, 2009), students did better on a subsequent test on their learning of that topic than with the text-based presentation alone.  That’s not too surprising, since using multiple modes of presentation is typically better than only one mode.  The UIUC folks have also used the multimedia modules in several courses — students watch the modules, and then take a short quiz on their understanding before class.  In another publication (Phys. Rev. ST, 2010), they found that students overall performed better on these “preflight” questions than did students in traditional lectures.  However, they have also reported that students don’t do much better, if at all, on course exams (Am. J. Phys, 2010).  Their interpretation of these results are that students are masters of efficiency.  If they’re aiming for a “B”,  then they’re going to get that “B” with as little work as possible.  So, by guiding students, the modules might have helped them to be more efficient in their studying practices.

Another study in Biology (Lents and Cifuentes, Web-based learning enhancements, J. College Sci. Teach., Nov/Dec 2009), some lecture attendance was replaced with video lectures that consisted of the visual of a powerpoint slide presentation enhanced with audio voiceover.  They found no effect (negative or positive) on student learning from this substitution.  While these authors were aiming to reduce student time-on-task for their largely commuter college, this does suggest the next step — having students engage in video-based learning at home and using lecture time for additional engagement — could be beneficial.

So, it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt to add some sort of pre-class preparation, and if you find some way to guide your students through the topic in a way that is more suited to novice learners than a dense textbook — it could help free up some of your class time to do more in-depth learning.

I’ve written before on the idea of the “Flipped Classroom” for science instruction, where some of class content is moved outside of class time.  Video lessons are recorded in advance, and assigned as homework, freeing the in-person instructional time for working to apply and master that content with the guidance of the instructor.  This is not that radical of an idea — after all, in English class, students read the book before class, and then discuss it in class.  Science is somewhat anomalous in that we think that content delivery has to happen during instruction because students can’t wrestle with the ideas on their own.

I just had the opportunity to take a workshop on the flipped classroom from one of its’ active proponents, Aaron Sams, and wanted to share a few of the ideas I got there.

First, here’s a short YouTube video where Aaron Sams describes his Flipped Classroom, which I think gives a good overview of what it looks like in practice.

Aaron Sams – The Flipped Classroom

You can read more about the Flipped Classroom at several places:

• Learning4Mastery site about the technique
• Aaron Sam’s blog
• The Flipped Classroom network (where educators share ideas and support)
• The Daily Riff article

First, Aaron emphasizes, there is no such thing as “the” flipped classroom.  Every educator can take a different approach that matches his or her goals and classroom setting.  The way that he does his classroom is that he spends 5 minutes on a warmup activity, 10 minutes of Q&A time on the video, and then the rest of the class is spend in guided independent practice and/or labs. Of course, he’s in a high school setting, so his class size allows for such an approach, but stay tuned for some ideas that I got for use in the college setting.

In order to flip your classroom, you need three things:

1. Quality instructional videos (made by you or someone else)
2. Engaging class activities
3. Assessment to see if it worked.

Engaging class activities

Let’s start here.  What are you going to have your students do during class?  Worksheets?  Group work?  Labs?  The key is that the activity allows you to get in among the students, interacting with them so that that class time is better used to help guide them and allow them to achieve mastery of the content you want them to grasp.   The videos are meant to get at the lower levels of understanding (e.g., “remembering”).  The class time is meant to get into the higher levels of understanding (“application,” “synthesis,” etc.).

Videos

“We don’t use a tool for the sake of using a tool,” says Dan Spencer, “we use a tool when it is appropriate for the job at hand.”  Similarly, you shouldn’t make a video for the sake of making a video.  The pedagogy must drive the technology, not the other way around.  So, what do you want your students to learn?  Consider:  What do my students need me physically present for htat I currently assign out of class, and what I can I remove from class time that my students do not need me present for?  Direct instruction / problem sets / and lab reports, are common answers.

Consider a single lesson to start.  If you want to have students work on problem-solving skills, perhaps model problem-solving in your screencasts.    If you want to guide them through the book reading, perhaps create an online version of the lecture to help cue their attention to the important ideas (this has been done and studied some at UIUC).

Here are some example types of videos:

• A lecture (can use pre-recorded ones, like MIT Open Courseware)
• Video of you demonstrating how something works in real life
• Video of a lab procedure
• Guided problem-solving
• Homework solutions
• Prelab activity
• Exam review

So, in the college setting, you could imagine using this sort of approach perhaps once a week, to go over homework, to help students get started on homework, to get them ready for an in-class activity.  If the videos are useful and help students either do better in the course, or get a good grade more efficiently, that motivation may be enough for them to watch them.  And you can then use the in-class time for tutorials, small group work, or other activities.  Sure there’s some up-front work to be done, but once the videos are done, you can use them over and over.

You can see a wide variety of example videos on the Learning4Mastery YouTube channel. I highly recommend checking it out — just a few minutes will give you a better sense of what can be done.

What kind of equipment might you need to do this?

An iPad makes it very easy.  Use ReplayNote to import a PDF, or ShowMe is a free app.  ScreenChomp allows you to download the result as a video.  And you can make your own stylus for an iPad for more precise drawings using these instructions here.

An annotated Powerpoint is also very easy.   Use screen capture software to record your screen (Camtasia is nice but pricey, Jing has a 5-minute limit, and Screencastomatic is all web-based).  To annotate the powerpoint you can use:

• A tablet (like the $60 Bamboo tablet), though I found this to be a bit clunky
• Activeslate on your Promethean or Smartboard, if you have one
• A document camera (like Ipevo for $69) to focus on paper.  This seemed to be the easiest to do equations.

A webcam is helpful, to capture video of yourself.

It’s nice to have pop-up boxes (“callouts”) to point out certain items on your screen.  You can do this automatically in Camtasia, but you could do it in other software with manually created callouts.

A calculator emulator is very helpful, so you can model how students would calculate some of these quantities.  Just google Calculator Emulator to find a wide variety of emulators.  Here’s one.

Aaron had some tips to consider:

• Aim for about 5 minutes
• Use one video per topic, rather than cramming everything into one video
• It takes about 30 minutes to record and edit a 10-minute video (at least, once you get good at it)
• Do we need it perfect, or do we need it Tuesday?  Be satisfied with imperfection rather than obsessively editing.  You can correct your mistakes with callouts.
• Create PPT’s that have blank spots for the webcam image and the calculator emulator, as well as spaces for working out example problems.
• Think about how you want the final lesson to look when creating those PPTs.

Assessment

If you’re going to challenge students to learn at a higher level, you have to test them at that higher level too.  Use continuous formative assessment to see if they’re achieving your standards.   Have them make a Prezi to indicate how ideas in the class are connected.   Have them work together on a group research project.  Whatever it is, have it match your instruction, so that your goals, instruction, and assessment are all aligned.