- How to engage students in a large lecture hall? How well do students understand the concepts you are talking about? In this video, you will watch two real examples of a teaching strategy which can be used for meaningful engagement in a large class. Both examples were from the same lecture. - So, what types of measurements do you think placebo effects will be more pronounced in? Okay? You'll do a show of hands. One, two, three, or four. Okay? So, what types of measurements have placebo effects been more pronounced for? You get a higher placebo effect in which condition? One, two, three, or four? Okay, get your hands ready. Get your hands ready. Okay. Ready. One, two, three. Okay. So, I have a three and a two here, have a four, a three here, some threes over here, some three here, some threes and fours, okay, some threes and fours. So just talk to someone with a different number. Okay? If you picked three, convince your neighbour why three is the right answer. If you picked four, convince your neighbour why four is the right answer. Okay and then we'll re-vote in a moment. (students discussing) Okay, let's vote again. Okay. Time to talk to your neighbour and convince them, one way or the other, right? Do you change your mind? So get your hands out, again. Get ready to vote, one, two, three. So, four, four, four, four, four. Still some threes. Okay, still some threes. Anyone have a one or two? No more one or two? Different ways of showing four. Looks like four is quite dominating. Right and, indeed, the answer is number four. Subjective and continuous. So dichotomous, that's quite a leap for the placebo to make, right? If it's a continuous measurement, it could just be an increase by one point out of ten or one or two points out of ten. We tend to see the highest placebo responses if you're measuring something subjective and continuous, okay? Alright, so, we'd assign some kind of meaning to this Bayer Brand. Right? And then we have some expectation and meaning we assign to the things that the doctor told us in this kind of study, right? So I wanna look at a really interesting study that's been done with medical students. And then we can also recreate this experiment inside a class itself, okay? I've done this in previous years. Do a little quick, quick survey. So medicines have meaning. So which colour of pill do you think will cause a sedative effect in the students? Okay? So, you can talk to your neighbour, if you wish, again. And this one, I want you to go onto Moodle, okay? (students discussing) So, please go onto Moodle and log in your response. And we can check your responses versus these medical students. And we can check your responses also versus the SMIBO class from last year, as well. Okay, let's take a look and see what the class has said. Which colour of pill do you think will cause a sedative effect on the students? So 91 said blue pill, and only 21 said pink pill. And then these 16 guys, I'll come looking for them after the lecture. So, vast majority of people thought blue pill was gonna have a sedative effect. Okay, look at SMIBO class from last year. 86 of the students said blue, 15 thought pink. The data from you guys, and also from last year's class, fits very well with the data obtained in the original study of the medical students. The students also assigned a sedative meaning to the blue pill. The blue pill is gonna make you more sleepy than a pink pill is gonna make you even though neither pill has any kind of active medication in it. So, 66% of the subjects on the blue capsules felt less alert compared with 26% who were taking the pink capsules. 72% of the students on the blue capsules felt more drowsy compared to 37% on the pink. So for some reason, we assign some meaning to the blue colour and the pill. The blue pill is calming and, indeed, if you look at actually marketed sedative drugs, I think most of them are coloured blue, right? So, it made me think. I never use a blue background colour for my PPT, right? Because you're going to assign the blue colour to the sleepy effect and then you have a higher chance to fall asleep. So, I've avoided blue background in my PPT since I've read this paper. We just have a nice, white background. - What you saw are examples of audience response system (ARS), also known as classroom response system (CRS). It refers to a face-to-face setting to poll students and gather students' responses to teachers' questions. Questions used are typically in true-or-false, ranking, or multiple choice format. It can be used anytime in a lecture before or after the concepts are presented. - Yeah, I think there's several reasons. So, when I'm asking for student responses, I'm either, many times, getting them to make some kind of reason, hypothesis based on information that we've just learned in the last 20 minutes or so in the lecture time. So I can kinda gauge their understanding of the material. And for a science course, it is good for them to practise formulating hypotheses. And we get them to predict what an experimental result is gonna be in a particular paper. So that's very good practise. I can see if they've learned what we've just talked about. Also, can ask and use an audience response system to kind of spark some controversy, like, ask them some controversial questions where the students may have very different opinions so they need to spend some time talking to each other and reasoning with each other about why do I have this opinion versus that opinion? It kind of injects a little bit of excitement in the class. Teaching a longer period, like a two-hour lecture, I think it's nice to have an audience response system to kinda break up the flow of the lecture time and you wouldn't want to just have unidirectional transfer of information for two hours. It's difficult for anybody to accept that. Yeah, I think in longer lectures, it's quite nice to include some audience response system use and ask some questions to break up the flow of the two hours and get the students active and turn the exchange of information, not just from teacher to student, but from student back to teacher and from student to student and then back to the teacher, as well. Many times we'll just show the responses on the projection screen in the lecture hall. So it's very easy to access this using the Moodle platform. So I can just look at the results. If it's an MCQ question, we can look at what percentage of students have answered option one, two, three, or four. So, that's quite easy to look at. If it's a longer text response with a couple of sentences, with 120 students, you probably don't have time to go through all of the responses, but you can look at 10 or 15 longer responses and just put it up on the screen in the lecture hall. And the students, I think they enjoy looking at that. Their interest is piqued, as well. They wanna see, "Well, what did my neighbours respond?" And some of the responses are quite interesting. So, I think it's another way to get the students interested in the material. I also use it for practical purposes, as well. I use the Moodle platform as my audience response system. With each reply from the student, you have their name logged into their responses. So, I can see how many students have attended that day, who's attended, it will give me a column of non-respondents for that day, as well, so I can see who's present and who's absent, who's putting in the effort to actually think about the question and answer it. That's another positive aspect, I think, of using the audience response system. - As shown in this video, audience's responses can be collected through both technical and non-technical methods. We can simply ask students to raise their hands to make a choice or give them coloured cards with each colour responding to a choice in a multiple-choice question. That is non-technical method. With technology, students just respond through transmitters or online response system. - 'Cause everyone has a smartphone now and we can have pretty good audience response systems built into learning management systems. In regards to low-tech, I think low-tech can work just as well, right? Can work just as well. Students can do a show of hands. If I give them, like, four options, do you think it's number one, number two, number three, number four? What's your best guess based on the previous material we just covered? And then we can kind of look around the room and see the overall show of hands. If you answered number two and your neighbour answered number three, okay, you need to talk to each other because you've come up with a different conclusion. So, what's your reason for picking the choice that you picked, right? So then you can get some dialogue generated between the students. And then, I find, with the low-tech system, I like to re-poll, again. We get a poll, maybe the class is a little bit divided in terms of the choices that they've made, one, two, three, or four. I'll give them a chance to speak with each other and explain why they made the choice that they did and then poll again. And quite often, with a second polling, you will see more uniformity of responses where there's a higher percentage of students that have actually chosen the correct answer for that particular question. I think re-polling, and doing a poll, getting the students to talk about why they picked the answer that they did, that's another great thing to incorporate when you're using an audience response system. With longer response, longer text answers, I think I prefer to use Moodle 'cause they can type in their response. - The advantage of using technical methods are obvious. They are anonymous in a way students do not have to make an overt gesture for their responses to the questions. These methods can also project students' responses on-screen immediately. The non-technical methods can do neither of these, but this is not necessarily a disadvantage. I heard from many teachers that the non-technical methods, show-of-hands or coloured cards, actually give them a better idea about the distribution of students' responses in a crowd. So, they know better how to regroup students for the follow-up discussions. Will you use audience response system in your teaching? I recommend you to think about three things if you are going to use. A trigger question, analysis of students' responses, and student discussion. An effective trigger question is very important when using the ARS. The questions can range from knowledge-type, namely, simple, factual record to application or evaluation-type. Good questions can encourage students to use higher-order thinking skills. One more thing you can consider, when using ARS, is to make full use of the students' responses data to identify students' common misconceptions in given topics. In the long-term, such data will give you an idea about the common patterns and difficulties in student understanding so that you could adjust your teaching plan to meet students' learning needs. The technical methods, apparently, have an advantage in storing and exporting such data. Another important thing to think about is engaging students in discussion. Without discussions and analysis of students' responses, what students experience would be mainly in-class quizzes. Like Gavin, many teachers ask their students to discuss their responses in groups after the first polling which is then followed by a second polling. This approach is known as peer instruction. It is through meaningful discussions that students are deeply engaged with the learning materials.
