1.2 Writing effective questions

Once an instructor has embraced the idea of interactive teaching, having good questions is the single most important element for having a successful class using clickers. Ideally you would like a question that students will interpret properly and will see as interesting and challenging, will stimulate students to want to hear and analyze the ideas of their classmates, will shape student thinking in desired ways, will reveal unanticipated student difficulties or interpretations, and will accurately reveal whether or not students are mastering the material. However, a question can be more than adequate without achieving all these goals, and it is hard to predict which questions will be great until you try them, so it is best not to spend too long agonizing over creating the perfect question.

By far the most common failing is to make questions that are too easy. In this situation, students often see the questions as simply a quiz to keep them awake, and they are annoyed that they had to spend money on clickers only for this purpose. There is also some indication that, in the absence of any other form of feedback, easy questions may mislead students as to the difficulty of the questions they would expect to see on the exam. In extensive surveys of students in many different classes, students overwhelmingly see challenging questions as the most useful for their learning. Our observations have also supported the conclusions that such questions result in greater learning.

Usually, the best starting point for obtaining good clicker questions is to look and see what might already be available, either from an instructor who has used clickers in the class previously, or in one of a number of online repositories for such questions. The instructor’s guides to many textbooks now offer lists of questions. These can be an easily accessible starting point for finding questions, but these textbook questions unfortunately are often quite simple and factual.

The best way for finding online repositories of questions is to type “ConcepTests” (the label chosen by Eric Mazur who developed this method of instruction) into Google. This brings up listings of question collections in numerous fields. A few specific examples are Mazur’s site (External Link) ; a collection of links to question banks in physics, chemistry, and earth sciences is at (External Link) . A question bank for biology is being created at (External Link) .

From in-class observations of instructor lectures, we have noticed several places to find good clicker questions. You can try to pick up on these yourself, or you might find it helpful to invite a colleague or graduate student to observe a few lectures.

Questions professors pose to the students spontaneously during class.