In last week’s post I discussed why I think it is good to give students in-class work that they get points for even if they are wrong. While I find this fairly easy to do in many small classes, I think it is a little harder in large classes, especially if you are trying to get meaningful information about what students are learning. For example, you can have students respond to a prompt… but are you really going to read 200 responses and form a coherent strategy for addressing misconceptions in an amount of time that doesn’t eat your whole week? You can also have them take quizzes in real time during class…. But without having them buy clickers…. how?
When trying to figure out what I wanted to do in my 200 person class on days where we have a “normal” lecture, and not a period-long activity, I knew a few things. I did not want to have to buy anything. I did not want to ask my students to buy anything. And I wanted to minimize the amount of administrative work to grade and get points into Canvas. In my early days at Virginia Tech I went to a couple “trainings” on different clicker type devices and apps, but they always ended with how much extra it would cost me or my students. I also experimented with a couple of fun, free quiz sites that worked okay be required some finagling to get stuff into canvas and then always eventually started charging. I even developed my own system using google forms. No one wants to hear the details of that mess.
One day the idea popped into my head to just use Canvas. It’s not the flashiest or most fun interface, but all students use it AND you can get semi-real time information about how many students are entering each possible answer in a quiz. As with many of my half-formed ideas that I just decided to try one day, I was a little worried it would devolve into a tornado of tech issues. But you know what? Turns out students are pretty forgiving when you just say “hey, I was trying something I thought would be cool, but turns out it didn’t work! Everyone gets full credit on this quiz.”
It also turns out it worked pretty well. Here’s what I do. I create a quiz in Canvas. I give the quiz an access code so students need to be in class to get the code to take the quiz (very easy to give the quiz code to students who were sick, etc). Then I set the quiz up so students get two attempts with their final score as the highest of the two attempts.
In class, when we get to the quiz, I tell the students “Okay, take Quiz 1 on canvas, the code is 8675309.” The first few times we do this, I explain to them WHY I am doing it. I talk about how important retrieval practice is for learning. I ask if anyone has noticed they don’t really understand how to drive between two places until they’ve tried it without their phone gps… retrieval! Then I tell them I can see if a lot of people get a question wrong and that also lets me know if I did a bad job on something, and then we can go over it. Finally, I remind them of how the grading will work: They try the first attempt with only their brain. Click submit. Then open the second attempt and enter the correct answers as we go over them. It’s a guaranteed 100% on every single one if you are there and participating.
After a few minutes of quiz-taking, on a screen the students cannot see, I click the “Quiz Statistics” button on the quiz page in Canvas (see image above). It takes a minute to load, but then shows how many students chose each answer for each question. If a lot of students missed a question, we go over it in more depth, otherwise, I breeze through, simply stating the correct answer as we go over them.
I’ve yet to have a complaint from students about this approach. Even if students only have their phone on them, they seem to be pretty used to working in the Canvas app and don’t have trouble. Virginia Tech has a policy where students must have a laptop, but if your institution does not, or if you are solely asking students to do this on their phone because you don’t allow computers in class, I would make it clear that there is another option (students can write the correct answers down on a sheet of paper and turn it in).
Finally, sometimes I still decide it is best to have students write something down in response to a prompt. My approach here is to create a Canvas assignment and have them enter their response. I then just roll through the gradebook giving every student who submitted something their points. I will spot-check 20-30 to be sure there aren’t major and rampant misunderstandings, but I think that’s enough… we go over them after they submit, after all. This semester, for the first one of these, I exported the responses to a spreadsheet so I could scan through them all more quickly. I found a few that didn’t address the question and responded to those students for a bit of a course correction.
I don’t think this method is perfect, but it lets me do quite a bit of retrieval practice and activities in a large class lecture without it taking enormous amounts of my time. I think that’s better than avoiding the time sink by doing nothing and I super duper don’t want to ask my students to buy a clicker.
This class meets twice a week, and during the other meeting, we do class period-long activities in ESRI’s arc online or various digital globes. More on that later this semester.