Polling allows you to gather ideas, test knowledge or canvas the opinion of a large group of students, with users responding anonymously. At Durham, Poll Everywhere is available as a Core Educational Tool. Polling software is a popular choice for anyone looking to increase interactivity and student engagement during lectures, tutorials and seminars. Whilst it gained popularity during face-to-face lectures, polling software can be used just as effectively in online or dual-mode classes. The original solutions required physical handsets (clickers) but modern solutions can be used by anyone with the mobile phone app or via a browser.
Peer Instruction
Popularised by Harvard University Professor Eric Mazur, Peer Instruction (1997) is an approach to teaching difficult concepts that requires students to first answer a question individually, then discuss their reasoning with peers, before answering the same question a second time. Only then is the correct answer revealed. The idea being that those students who knew the correct answer are required to articulate their understanding to a peer, and those who do not receive the benefit of some one-to-one tuition. Polling software has proven particularly effective in facilitating Peer Instruction during live lectures and is often combined with a flipped classroom approach.
Designing Peer Instruction Questions
The key to an effective peer instruction activity is a well-designed question. Ideally, your question should be a problem or based around a scenario, rather than a fact that can simply be recalled.
You should aim to design a question that will create a split in the audience, where slightly more participants will be able to provide a correct answer than those who cannot answer correctly. If too many students are able to answer correctly, the ensuing discussion becomes meaningless; likewise, if most of your students are not able to answer correctly, you are unlikely to find more students getting the answer correct after the discussion. Mazur calls this ‘the sweet spot’. Simon Lancaster (2018) takes this idea further in his ideas about question design, and refers to it as the ‘goldilocks zone’.
Counteracting the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’
The Dunning-Kruger effect (1999) is sometimes referred to as the ‘false expert syndrome’. It’s the idea that confidence and competence can be mutually exclusive.
As educators it isn’t always simple to discern which of our students are really struggling until it’s too late. Those who are often the least confident may shy away and attempt to disguise their shortcomings. For instance, in a typical low-tech ‘show of hands‘ poll, you will often find that people follow the majority. Equally, on the reverse, many students are far less confident in their ability than their actual aptitude should warrant, and this can lead to indecision and hold them back from reaching their highest potential.
By using anonymous polling, Fabio Arico (2018) has developed a workflow that can augment typical polling or the Peer Instruction workflow by adding a ‘how confident did you feel in your answer‘ question after each poll. This allows an instructor to get a sense of how many of the initial responses were guesses. This can work both ways – some students who are very confident about their initial answer may have actually answered incorrectly. If conducted as a regular exercise, an educator can begin to develop a fairly robust idea of how their students are doing and feeling.
Critical Reflection: Regular Module Feedback
One of Brookfield’s four lenses (2017, 2nd ed.) for critical reflection is the student’s eyes. Polling can be a powerful tool for soliciting small and regular pieces of feedback about how your students are feeling there and then.
Are your students enjoying themselves? Are they bored? Are they stressed? Are you going too fast? Too slow? Teaching pace and perceived high cognitive load are two of the most widely cited issues that students encounter, especially when it comes to lectures.
It takes a confident educator to open yourself to anonymous feedback – which can sometimes be harsh and untrammelled (remember that giving feedback is a skill too!) but polling offers a different dimension for feedback beyond the formal avenues such as MEQs and the NSS.
References
Aricò, F.R. & Lancaster, S.J. (2018) Facilitating active learning and enhancing student self‑assessment skills. International Review of Economics Education, 29, pp. 6–13. [ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk]
Brookfield, S.D. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey‑Bass.
Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999) ‘Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self‑assessments’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), pp. 1121–1134.
Mazur, E. (1997) Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.