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With students, it’s not always easy to tell exactly how they’re performing. You can remind them to do their reading until you’re blue in the face, and they might swear blind that they’re doing everything asked of them, but student life throws lots of unexpected nights out at them, so it’s very difficult to make sure they’re working outside of lectures.
But without constantly checking up on them, how can you find out how much they are remembering and understanding from your lectures?
Student response systems are the perfect way to combat this problem. If you inform students that each week, they will receive a tracking test to see how well they understand the content and the assigned reading, they might not be happy about it.
However, if you explain that this will take place electronically and will involve answering a series of multiple choice questions based on the material covered to date, they will be less likely to protest.
Knowing that they will need to answer questions based on the reading may prompt them into reading more thoroughly as they will want to perform well in front of their peers. You should ask questions based on material from lectures, seminars and the assigned reading to reward those students who do all the work they are supposed to.
You can then set the voting software to record the responses of each individual student so you can keep track of who has responded correctly and who hasn’t.
As soon as the responses from everyone’s votes have been collected by the wireless receiver, this data is then transformed immediately into an attractive graph showing the results clearly.
This way, everyone can see how they have performed in comparison to everyone else and those who are underperforming by consistently lagging behind the rest of the group will be made aware that they need to start working harder, which may encourage them to do so.
This information is extremely useful for lecturers who can keep a record of who appears to be performing on target and who is struggling. This way, they can target their support based not only on the strengths and weaknesses of the group as a whole, but towards individuals who appear not to be engaging with the material effectively.
This means that nobody will fall by the wayside as a result of a lack of awareness about any difficulties they may be having, and everyone will be able to keep up more easily even if they feel too shy to ask for help initially.