Teaching with Classroom Response Systems
Resources for engaging and assessing students with clickers
Students Writing Clicker Questions
Author: derekbruff5 Feb
Eric Tremblay recently blogged about his plans to have his students write clicker questions for him to use during class. He’s not lazy; he wants his students to think about the material in his course and possible misunderstandings of that material. Student questions will be posted in a class forum, and he’ll select one or more each week to use in class. Students earn participation credit for posting questions and triple credit when their questions are the ones selected.
Having students write exam questions as a way of preparing them to take exams is a time-honored teaching strategy, but I have only lately heard of instructors like Eric having students craft clicker questions as a way to have them engage with course material. Writing clicker questions is difficult, but that’s due in part to the difficulty of predicting student misunderstandings, which is required for constructing good wrong answer choices. I wonder if students might be better able to identify potential misunderstandings since they are not experts in their fields and are thus closer, in a sense, to those misunderstandings.
This idea of having students write clicker questions came up a few times at the recent Joint Mathematics Meetings I attended. Have you tried this? I would be interested in hearing how this plays out.
4 Responses for "Students Writing Clicker Questions"
[...] instructor is the one posing the questions, not the students. Although, as I mentioned last week, some instructors ask their students to write clicker questions. Freed’s concern reminds me of a limitation of teaching with clickers I’ve noted [...]
The focus of education must be understanding of the basic principles and logical consequences, along with evidence. Professors must understand how students think, and build from there. See “Teaching and Helping Students Think and Do Better” on amazon.
I know that instructors have had really mixed success with having students write exam questions, and I would think that the same would apply to clicker questions. This is a very high level skill (the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy). Most instructors, when starting out, write quiz-like questions, so it seems a lot to expect students to do much more than this kind of factual recall question. So, it may be a useful learning strategy for practicing factual questions, but most students aren’t going to be metacognitive enough to get at deep level thinking with this kind of strategy — they need more scaffolding and support.
My heavens, I used a lot of ed-speak in that comment. My apologies, I believe that I’ve been turned to the “dark side”!
Good points, Stephanie. I have a colleague here at Vanderbilt in psychology who has had great success in having her students write clicker questions. She makes it an integral part of the course, which helps, and she spends a good bit of time teaching her students to write good questions. I’ve been meaning to talk with her further about this. Maybe it’s time for me to get back in the podcast game with an interview? =)
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