PERSONAL RESPONSE SYSTEM: CONNECTING WITH STUDENTS

1
INTERACTIVE AND INTEGRATIVE TEACHING TO LARGE
CLASSES John Baird, Mike Wilson and Mary Cotter
(course co-ordinators)

• Introduction
• Teaching large groups of students in classes of
  up to 400 can lead to a breakdown in the
  connection between students and teachers. This
  can result in poor attendance, ineffective
  learning, disappointing exam results and
  ultimately poor retention of students.
• To address the problem of communicating with
  large groups of students, the College purchased
  Personal Response System handsets for the BI1004
  (Organismal Biology) course. These operate in a
  way familiar to anyone who has watched the
  audience respond to questions on the TV show Who
  Wants to be a Millionaire. Each student is
  issued their own personal handset, which they use
  to respond to questions posed to them using a
  PowerPoint slide. Results of students responses
  are presented as a bar chart superimposed on the
  question slide. The bar indicating the correct
  response is coloured differently to the incorrect
  responses.
• Several questions were embedded into each lecture
  and, based on students response, certain aspects
  could be further explained or else deemed to have
  been adequately covered. In addition to
  interactive learning within core lectures,
  Integrative Sessions were incorporated into the
  course. And because students register their
  handset at the beginning of each lecture,
  vulnerable, non-attending students were
  identified and offered assistance.

Response is shown as total number of students who
chose a particular answer
Question is posed
Students respond using handset
Integrative sessions Four core lectures were
taken out of the course and replaced with
Integrative Sessions in which PRS was the main
element. The Integrative Sessions brought
together topics that had recently been covered in
the course, with the aim of altering the context
of specific subjects and, if possible basing
individual questions on several different aspects
of biology e.g. students had been taught about
mammals and plants separately, so a film showing
interactions between mammals and plants was shown
to the class, after which questions exploring
such interactions were posed.
Identifying vulnerable students Upon issue,
students entered their student ID number into
their PRS handset. Also, each handset bears a
serial number, so if the students ID number is
incorrectly entered, the set can be traced to the
student to whom it was issued. During the first
few weeks of the course, students attendance was
monitored, and non- or poorly-attending students
contacted via e-mail. Response from students was
varied and many had valid reasons for
non-attendance including having entered their
student ID number incorrectly into the PRS
handset.

• Conclusions
• PRS has been a very popular addition to BI1004,
  not only among students, but also staff
• An air of healthy competition was thought to have
  been generated among students, when questions
  were asked using PRS
• Failure rate has reduced from approximately 10
  in previous years to 2 in 2007-08, which may in
  part be due to PRS

• Student feedback
• 75 of BI1004 students responded using the
  Student Course Evaluation Forms (SCEF)
• Of the students who completed SCEF, 35 stated
  that they liked PRS (none stated that they
  disliked PRS)
• PRS was by far the most commented upon part of
  the course, with less than 5 of students
  commenting on other specific aspects

Other BI1004 team members Alan Bowman, Jim
McDonald, Gordon McEwan, Derek Scott, Derryck
Shewan, Ian Stansfield, Trevor Stuchbury and
Chris Wilcock.