JOURNAL OF MICROBIOLOGY & BIOLOGY EDUCATION, May 2015, p. 87-89 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/jmbe.v16i1.890
Supplemental Materials for Use of Constructed-Response Questions to Support Learning of Cell Biology during Lectures Foong May Yeong Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117597
Table of Contents (Total pages 7)
Appendix 1: Example of a short-answer question Appendix 2: Example of an Excel report Appendix 3: End-of-semester student feedback Appendix 4: Students’ perceptions of the constructed-response questions Appendix 5: Advantages of constructed-response questions Appendix 6: Disadvantages of constructed-response questions
Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Biochemistry, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, MD7, 8 Medical Drive, Singapore 117597. Phone: +65 6516-8866. Fax: +65 6790-1453. E-mail:
[email protected]. ©2015 Author(s). Published by the American Society for Microbiology. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionNoncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ and https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode), which grants the public the nonexclusive right to copy, distribute, or display the published work.
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Appendix 1: Example of a short-answer question.
(A) Example of Clicker questions in the MCQ format used in previous semesters. (B) Example of a short-answer question converted from MCQ question and link to Socrative for students to provide their answers. (C) Examples of students’ constructed answers to the question shown in Figure 1B.
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Appendix 2: Example of an Excel Report. Report shows students’ in-class answers (in black). Green and red comments were added by me after class as additional feedback for students.
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Appendix 3: End-of-semester student feedback. Students’ feedback on the use of short-answer questions were conducted at SurveyMonkey. Survey questions using a 5-point Likert scale were designed at SurveyMonkey and the link emailed to students after their examinations.
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Appendix 4: Students’ perceptions of the constructed-response questions.
Comparison of the perceptions from students who had and had not used in-class response systems on the use of constructed-answer questions in class. Survey questions using a 5-point Likert scale were designed at SurveyMonkey and the link emailed to students after their examinations. (A) On the 5point scale, 1= very difficult, 2 = difficult, 3 = neutral, 4 = not difficult and 5 = not difficult at all; (B) On the 5-point scale, 1 = not useful at all, 2 = not useful, 3 = neutral, 4 = useful and 5 = very useful; (C) 1 = not important at all, 2 = not important, 3 = neutral, 4 = important and 5 = very important.
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Appendix 5: Advantages of constructed-response questions.
Table 1. What were the advantages (if any) of using the constructed-answer questions in class as compared to MCQs? 1. Allows us to think through and come up with the answers on our own as compared to choosing an answer from a set of provided options 2. Allows one to actively articulate their thoughts on a particular question 3. We learn how to structure our answers better. 4. Requires more thought, practice for explaining something without being vague or missing the point 5. The difficulty level is there to think of answers and their phrasing 6. Have to come up with the answer 7. Better preparation for exam style. 8. Better picture of what is going on 9. Easier to test flow of concepts 10. Helps us to phase our answers and decide what is relevant to the question. 11. Provided a more in-depth understanding to concepts and clarified doubts with regards to the context of the question whereas MCQs tend to only focus on one part of the question with minimal elaboration and explanation. 12. More useful in testing our understanding of concepts and allow us to think before answering instead of choosing an answer from 4options. 13. More elaboration 14. Force the students to recall back previous concept that have been taught, which is good because it is a form of revision for the students. 15. Learning to express idea more scientifically 16. Made us think. 17. It allows for a full range of answers compared to MCQs where there would be mostly 2^5 possible answers (for true/false questions). Also, it allows students to practice articulating their thoughts in a succinct way. It also reflects/reveal more completely the misconceptions, if any, that students might have. 18. Allows for more elaborate questions reduces the probability of "guessing the correct answer" may occasionally be used as a platform for posing questions to the lecturer, especially when raising your hand in the middle of a lecture can be difficult for most people 19. Framing the answer in ones own words. Makes the student think deeply about the question and not just guess. 20. MCQs are easier as the key words will be there. But short answers let us think about which key words to include and think more about it. 21. It encourages us to formulate our response appropriately so that the lecturer will be able to understand our answers. 22. More inspiring to see the answers from other students 23. Use more effort in thinking, formulating and expressing the answers
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Appendix 6: Disadvantages of constructed-response questions.
Table 2. What were the disadvantages (if any) of using the constructed-answer questions in class as compared to MCQs? 1. Sometimes its difficult to type out the entire answer. Using mobile phones, it better to click a particular option than to type out the answer 2. longer time needed to write our a response 3. Troublesome to log in. 4. More annoying to go onto the website and log in and type out the answer instead of just pulling the clicker out of my bag and pressing a button 5. Sometimes I cant log into socrative. It's quite messy seeing answers pop out one after another on the top of the screen. should use another software whereby the latest answers sent in appears at the bottom of the list so that it's not confusing. 6. MCQs are easier to answer (just 1 click) 7. Needs more equipment to brought to class. 8. It takes some time to type. It is also possible that misconceptions are consolidated. 9. Can take some time to go through all of them 10. Takes up too much time and after awhile students stop responding with answers. 11. Time consuming, tedious and sometimes too long winded. 12. Less students may want to key in their answers. Especially bioengineering students becauseour answers compare poorly with that of life science students. 13. not enough time to formulate the answers properly 14. Can't guess/be reminded of the answer as there's nothing to take reference to. 15. Students may not want to participate in the short answer questions as compared to MCQs because they may be lazy to type out the answer, having difficulty recalling previous thing taught in class or feeling shy to share their answer. 16. Sometimes, ideas are not expressed perfectly but I don't know how to improve them. 17. time consuming. easy for people's mind to drift off/lose concentration 18. It was more time-consuming for students to type, and then for the lecturer to read the response and then to give comments. This reduces the amount of time that the lecturer has to complete the "syllabus". Having to type complete sentences/phrases might also put some students off as compared to simply pressing a button on a clicker. An MCQ response also has very "definite" answer so a student knows unambiguously if he/she has got the question correct. For SAQ, a student might think he/she has got it correct, when in fact, he/she would only have received partial credit for such an answer in the exam. It is important for the lecturer to point out clearly what "important points" ought to be present in a good answer. 19. people can prank since it's anonymous (but they can sometimes be rather entertaining as well:) 20. More time required. Students may not be answering to the best of their abilities. Some students post silly/funny answers for the purpose of laughter only, wastes time. 21. MCQs help us to understand not only why an answer is correct, but why all the other options are wrong 22. Students might be too lazy to type out or formulate the answers 23. takes a lot of time to set up, needs to bring along the computer
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