Student perspective questions can be used to help instructors get to know their students. Each class of students is unique, and it is often important for instructors not to rely on assumptions about students, their opinions, and their experiences. Asking these questions can provide useful information about students that helps prevent instructors from making unfounded assumptions about them and helps instructors tailor learning experiences to the unique makeup of students engaged in those learning experiences.

For example, Philippa Levine uses opinion questions to learn about the students in her course, The Evolution Debates, at the University of Southern California. Given the topic of the course, she sometimes finds it surprisingly easy to say something that seems harmless to her but off-putting to some of her students. By knowing where her students stand on sensitive topics, she is better able to avoid this.

Ed described the series of questions as “review” questions, used at the beginning of one week to review material from the previous week. He starts with the following question, which he describes as a “gimme” question:

Carl keeps a pet rhinoceros within a double electrified fence. A severe storm knocks out power, and the frightened rhino breaks through the fence, rampaging through the neighborhood and ramming Jodi’s car. In an action against Carl, Jodi may recover:

1. Full damages because Carl converted Jodi’s property
2. Full damages because trespass to chattels only requires substantial damages
3. Full damages because the rhino is a wild animal
4. Nothing, because Carl was not negligent

This was apparently an easy question for Ed’s students, since 100% of them chose the correct answer (C). Notably, this question has a single correct answer.

I’ve been thinking about clickable image questions lately because they’ve come up in three podcast interviews this year. In Episode 34 of Intentional Teaching, I talked with Sravanti Kantheti, program director for anatomy and physiology at Lanier Technical College, about her use of Top Hat’s “Ace” AI-powered learning assistant. That meant talking about her use of Top Hat, which has a variety of classroom response tools, including clickable image questions. (Top Hat calls them “click on target” questions.) Sravanti uses these questions in her anatomy and physiology courses, and she shared a favorite with me. She’ll show her students a diagram of a human heart and ask them, “Where in the heart would you find deoxygenated blood?” The resulting heatmap gives her a lot of information about her students’ understanding of heart anatomy and blood flow.

In my particular case, I happen to say, you know what, I’m going to stick to the Zoom native polling tool, because I think, for my purposes, it does pretty much what I would like. In the book I also described that within Zoom, you can do a little hack without using Zoom’s native polling tool to know not only the aggregate results, but to know which student voted for which option, which again, speaking of engagement, allows you to engage the students in a way that would be much harder to do because you can say, “Bonni, I noticed you said, B, can you tell us why.” Then, “Jimmy, I noticed you said C can you tell us why.” You generate a dialog that’s super easy to do because where each student stands.

Clickers are student response systems that allow students to anonymously share their answers to instructor questions. Answering clicker questions supported the metacognition of our participants by prompting them to monitor their own understanding of class content. Participants described especially valuing the instructor’s explanation of why each answer option was correct or incorrect. However, some implementation of clicker questions within STEM courses was problematic for participants, notably when clicker question responses required them to compose short answers within a limited amount of time. Josiah, a participant with a specific learning disorder in reading, and Stewart, a participant with ADHD, explained that they felt they needed more time to type their answers than provided by the instructor. This was especially concerning for Stewart, because his clicker questions were graded for accuracy in one of his classes. Other participants, like Kacey, explained that viewing the class responses to free-response clicker questions is particularly stressful for her due to differences in formatting.

How can Poll Everywhere enhance teaching and learning?

• By facilitating interactive activities such as knowledge-checks, quizzes, or polls for real-time or asynchronous engagement
• By displaying responses/results in real time through a visualized design for rapid comprehension and reflection
• By providing access to data for review from either the Poll Everywhere dashboard or through exported csv files
• By providing both anonymous and user-identified response options
• By syncing UVACanvas course rosters for individual student feedback records
• By interfacing with the UVACanvas Grades tool for inclusion in course grade calculations (optional)
• By allowing responses to be completed through either a browser (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari) or through the Poll Everywhere app on mobile devices