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1.2 Writing effective questions  (Page 2/2)

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Overhearing student discussions about questions posed in class.

Listening to students’ discussion and what they are thinking as they generate their answers often suggests good questions. Also, these discussions often suggest points that students are confused about and hence would be good incorrect answers to list and subsequently discuss. Professors can wander during this time, join a group discussion, and have a TA record and move around the classroom.

Questions students pose in class.

These can also be turned into excellent clicker questions. Although usually an instructor will make this a question in a subsequent class or term, don’t be afraid to do this in real time, by taking a question that a student has asked and throw it back to the entire class to answer. You can either create your own multiple choice answers on the spot, or get suggestions from students. This is a particularly good thing to do when you are pretty sure that most students can figure out the answer themselves.

Dealing with connections.

We frequently observe that students fail to make connections between new and previously learned concepts as well as connecting material with general themes in the course as a whole. Clicker questions can make these connections explicit.

Analogies.

Professors have many great analogies they use in lecture. These can provide a good basis for clicker questions.

While testing the question with students is the only way to find out if it is effective (in terms of promoting student learning, uncovering misconceptions, and generating student engagement and discussion) you can stack the odds in your favour by considering the following points.

  • Define your learning goal or objectives .
  • What you want students to be able to do (in terms of using content and skills, etc.)
  • Identify the goal(s) of the clicker question.
  • Choose type of question to use (see below for some options under “tactics”).

Example from geology 1010

  1. Learning goal ( What do you want students to be able to do? ):

Explain and demonstrate how geologists determine rates of tectonic plate motion from data on seafloor age.

Skills : calculating a rate, reasoning like a geologist, developing competence using geological data, interpreting a representation commonly encountered (but seldom explicitly explained) in textbooks

Concepts : tectonic plates move: the rate of past plate motion at spreading centers (divergent plate boundaries) is known from the age of oceanic crust making up the seafloor.

  1. Goal(s) of the clicker question

Promote articulation/discussion, stimulate cognitive processes

  1. Tactic or tactics to use

Qualitative question, analysis and reasoning, interpret representation, rank variants.

  1. Clicker question

The resulting clicker question had students to look at a map of the earth showing the ages of the seafloors, and students were asked to rank the relative speeds of the plates at various locations.

Beatty et al. I.D.Beatty, W.J. Gerace, W.J. Leonard, and R.J. Dufresne. “Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching,” American Journal of Physics, 74(1): 31-39 (2006). have discussed tactics to use in designing relatively advanced clicker questions. These are primarily of use to instructors experienced at using clicker questions.

Question design goals and tactics (beatty et al., 2006)
Question design goals Tactics
Direct attention and raise awareness - Remove nonessentials
- Compare and contrast
- Extend the context
- Reuse familiar question situations
- Oops-go-back
Promote articulation/discussion - Qualitative questions
- Analysis and reasoning questions
- Multiple defensible answers
- Require unstated assumptions
- Trap unjustified assumptions
- Deliberate ambiguity
- Trolling for misconceptions
Stimulate cognitive processes - Interpret representations
- Compare and contrast
- Extend the context
- Identify a set- Rank variants
- Reveal a better way
- Strategize only
- Include extraneous information
- Omit necessary information
Formative use of response data - Answer choices reveal likely difficulties
- Use “none of the above”
We add: Connect to the real world - Apply to real world setting
- Pose in terms of real world problem
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Source:  OpenStax, Clicker resource guide. OpenStax CNX. Apr 11, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10724/1.2
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