In-Class Polling for Student Engagement

In the late 90s, Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur coined the term "peer instruction" to describe what is now a well-researched approach to teaching with in-class polling. In this video, Mazur walks through the peer instruction process, and we hear from students about their experiences with peer instruction.

This book was written when classroom polling questions were limited to multiple-choice questions. However, as this book illustrates, there are a lot of useful pedagogical moves you can make with "just" a multiple-choice polling question.

This blog post describes a series of polling questions used by Vanderbilt University law professor Edward Cheng to help students realize when they've moved from a legal question with a clear answer to one where there's room for interpretation and argument.

Most classroom response systems have some kind of clickable image question type, where the instructor can upload an image and ask students to identify something within the image by clicking or tapping on it. This piece shares several creative examples of faculty using this open-ended question type for formative assessment.

Dan Levy talks about his book, Teaching Effectively with Zoom, on episode 324 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Around the 12-minute mark, Levy discusses effective uses of in-class polling systems to engage and assess students during synchronous online class sessions.

Mariel Pfeifer and colleagues interviewed a neurodiverse group of STEM majors about their experiences in active learning classrooms, including how they experience and navigate the use of in-class polling.

This article reviews three decades of scholarly literature on the use of classroom response systems, which used to be called "clickers" in reference to the hardware used. Included are student views on the technology, as well as a kind of map to the choices instructors have when using in-class polling.

Poll Everywhere is UVA's licensed in-class polling system. This page from CTE Learning Tech features information for UVA instructors who want to get started using Poll Everywhere or need support in using the tool.