SIX IDEAS THAT

SHAPED PHYSICS

FOURTH EDITION

Active Learning and Response Systems

SUPPORT FOR ACTIVE LEARNING

 

One of the main goals of the Six Ideas project is to provide support for professors seeking to make their classrooms more active and student-centered. The fundamental approach is one that some people call "Peer Instruction," where students ponder questions or work on tasks in small groups, talking with each other and working through issues together. Demonstrations can also be made active by requiring students to make specific predictions about what will happen before one actually shows the demonstration (this often works best when the demonstration outcome is surprising or counter-intuitive).

In addition to a textbook design that makes it possible for professors to depend on the textbook instead of lectures for basic exposition, the Six Ideas project provides professors tools that make creating an active and student-centered classroom as easy as possible:

  • Two-Minute Problems at the end of each chapter provide (mostly conceptual) questions that have been intentionally designed to serve as peer-instruction tasks. Some of these questions are directly tied to possible demonstrations.
  • The instructor's site provides class plans and activity worksheets that can be directly used or modified to serve the professor's needs.

Particularly in the case of the two-minute problems or active demonstrations, asking students to think about the problem individually for a minute or so before discussing the answer in groups provides for more effective instruction, because this allows students to become more personally engaged in the discussion and in the outcome.

RESPONSE Systems IN GENERAL

 

Such activities are most effective if professors have a way of getting responses from the students, because this both provides students with a specific a goal to work toward (formulating a response) and provides a way for the professor to monitor how the students are doing and focus instruction efforts where the need is greatest. At Pomona, where we are able to keep class sizes below 35 students, the professor and one or two undergraduate TAs actually circulate in the classroom, monitoring students' progress on the assigned activities, helping students get unstuck, answering questions, and generally gathering information. This approach works very well, but only when class sizes are relatively small.

One popular method in larger classrooms is to use "clickers," electronic devices that student's can use to send responses in the form of letters or digits wirelessly to a device connected to a computer. The computer then collates and displays the responses. Such devices are especially useful for getting students involved in large classrooms and for collecting hard data about students responses for later analysis. If one knows which students is operating which clicker, one can even enforce responses by having the responses figure into a student's grade.

But such systems have some downsides. Clickers are expensive. One can make each student purchase his or her own clicker, but students will lose them or forget to bring them, making things difficult. If one instead hands out clickers, the process of handing them out and collecting them can eat up precious class time, and makes it more difficult to associate a specific person with a specific clicker. The computer interfaces are sometimes tricky or quirky to operate, and may require that all questions to be used with the clickers be prepared in advance, making it hard to respond to students' needs in real time.

Those of us involved with Pomona's introductory courses tried using clickers for some years, but the disadvantages of the clicker systems pushed us toward two other kinds of response systems: back-cover letters and small whiteboards. These systems are low-tech and have either zero or fairly low costs. They are suitable for both large and small classrooms, and though they are not really suitable for gathering hard data or grading, they are flexible and adaptable, allowing one to pose questions on the fly. The sections below describe each of these systems in turn.

THE BACK-COVER LETTERS

 

The back cover of each of the Six Ideas volumes contains the letters A-F, T, and Z. This provides a simple, zero-cost, zero-overhead response system that students can use to display the answer any two-minute problem in the course. When it comes time for students to respond to a posed question, they only need to hold up their textbooks with the letters facing the professor and point to the letter corresponding to their chosen answer.

Students' responses are not completely private in this system, but a student would actually have to make an obvious effort to see anyone else's response, so this system is private enough in practice so that students are not inhibited. The letter T is provided to make it more natural to answer true-false questions. A student can use the letter Z to provide a positive response that says "I haven't got a clue," which itself is useful information.

When we first tried this system, we worried that it might be difficult for the professor to scan the classroom to see which letters the students were pointing at, especially in a large classroom. But this turns out to be much easier than we feared. Even in an auditorium that can hold several hundred students, a professor can scan the room and get approximate response rates for each possible answer in mere seconds. Exact counts are difficult, to be sure, but approximate answer distributions are almost always sufficient for instruction.

In the 3rd and 4th editions, some two-minute problems involve double-letter answers, which students can indicate by pointing two fingers at the letter.

If one really needs to collect hard data for some reason, a quick picture taken with a cell-phone is all that is required to preserve the responses for later analysis.

SMALL WHITEBOARDS

 

An alternative technique that we have been using recently at Pomona is small whiteboards (a trick we learned from Corinne Manogue at Oregon State). One can go to a home-improvement store and purchase an inexpensive 4-foot by 8-foot panel with a white shiny finish. One can cut such a board up into about 40 panels that are about 9 inches by 12 inches in size (or 28 panels that are a bit larger). Before class, we place a panel, a whiteboard marker, and an eraser on each student working-group's table. Students can then use the whiteboard to display responses by writing it on the whiteboard and holding the whiteboard up to face the professor.

This is not a zero-cost system (though the cost per panel is still very low), and is no different than the previous system with regard to privacy or data collection. But this system has one huge advantage: the response is not constrained to being letters. The responses can also be numerical quantities, phrases, arrows, even simple graphs or drawings. One can also physically collect certain responses to show the whole class as a model of a certain kind of response (and still protect the privacy of the responder if one is careful).

This system therefore provides the professor enormous flexibility in designing activities and gathering responses. However, it is easiest to use when the classroom is set up with tables on which one can lay the response boards before class. Distributing and collecting the boards, markers and erasers then does not use any class time.

© 2022 Thomas A. Moore. All Rights Reserved.