Improving Student Engagement Using Electronic Classroom Polling
8/1/2004
AAPT Meeting, Sacramento, CA, August 2004 (Contributed Talk)
Electronic classroom polling systems offer the potential to significantly enhance the effectiveness of Peer Instruction in large lectures. In addition to providing prompt and accurate feedback to the instructor, such systems also increase student participation by allowing students' responses to be anonymous to their peers. Data collected by electronic polling systems can be used by the instructor to correlate individual student lecture performance with performance in other aspects of the course. In this talk, I will discuss experiences with Peer Instruction at the University of Illinois over the past several years, both with and without electronic polling systems. I will also discuss what we have found to be key components to the successful implementation of a classroom polling system and data from our current solution.