Writing good TurningPoint questions
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John Stephens sent me a link today to a Wired Campus post on using clickers in the classroom (“clickers”=the generic name for TurningPoint type tools) . There were a couple good points (adapted below), but the main thing it made me think of is that we really ought to develop an SOG list of good clicker questions.
We actually started a list of sorts in a recent TurningPoint brownbag session, so add your clicker (TurningPoint) use questions and ideas to that post or simply add your comment below. Three edited examples from the Wired Campus article follow:
- Ask a question, have all the students think about it and respond to it individually, and then take a look at the results. If there’s a lot of consensus around the question, then it may be time to move on to the next thing. If there’s disagreement, then this is a question that the students can probably talk about together in small groups.
- Clickers can provide the instructor with some useful information about who their students are and where they’re coming from. That can allow the instructor to know, “Oh, I’m probably going to have to play the devil’s advocate on this issue because I don’t have many students that feel this way.”
- You can ask some high-level critical-thinking questions where students are asked to look at a particular quality of a peer’s or group’s answer to a sample case or problem and say, on a scale from 1-5, how good was this? And then you have a discussion about what was good or flawed about the response. Don’t make the questions too easy!
How have you used TurningPoint clickers? Share your ideas here…or there.
-Joel G.
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