IEEE Human System Interaction Conference, HSI 2013
Sopot, Poland, June 06-08, 2013
Interactive question based learning methodology and clickers: Fundamentals of Computer Science course case study L. Jackowska-Strumiłło*, J. Nowakowski*, P. Strumiłło**, P. Tomczak* * Institute of Applied Computer Science, Lodz University of Technology, Lodz, Poland, ** Institute of Electronics, Lodz University of Technology, Lodz, Poland,
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract. Audience response systems (ARS) or "clickers" are becoming more and more popular tools for managing audience response or voting feedback for certain questions. Currently, they are more commonly used in education, mostly to engage students during lectures in large classrooms and give the lecturer prompt anonymous response from the audience. The article presents a concept of using a clickers software, which can run on a mobile, tablet, PDA or PC. Such a solution offers flexible student-lecturer interaction. The article compares results of students’ learning outcomes for the students taught with and without question based learning methodology. Keywords: Audience response systems (ARS), clickers software, interactive lecturing, question based learning.
I. INTRODUCTION
M
ODERN educational approaches that focus mostly on the learning outcomes require more efforts both from students and lecturers to effectively improve teaching methodologies to stimulate students to continuous and systematic learning. Times, when lectures given by a professor and individual consultations was almost the only source of knowledge are gone. Nowadays in the era of the Internet, common access to multimedia, video recordings of lectures, availability of training and assessment materials, modern lecturing technologies, distant learning, etc. the role of traditional lecture is no longer a predominant teaching method. It becomes a meeting, where both sides the student and the lecturer want to gain more. Clickers offer a new concept of enhancing interaction between a lecturer and students. They make the lectures more interesting and interactive for the listeners and offer a rapid feedback to the lecturer about how the students comprehend new lectured material [1, 2, 3]. Clickers are the handheld small transmitters commonly used in an audience response systems (ARS) [4]. Wireless infrared clickers system Interwrite PRS shown in Fig. 1. is currently used in the Electrical, Electronic, Computer and Control Faculty (WEEIA) at the Lodz University of Technology (TUL) for immediate voting responses during Faculty Council meetings, but it is not used for education.
Lidia Jackowska-Strumiłło, Institute of Applied Computer Science, Lodz University of Technology, Lodz, Poland,
[email protected], ul. Stefanowskiego 18/22, 90-924 Łódź, Poland, phone +48 42 631 2750
Modern teaching technologies and questions based learning were used at TUL for a long time, but the idea of applying clickers for teaching appeared in the last year. The inspiration for introducing clickers methodology for lecturing was initiated by the collaboration between University of Applied Sciences in Oslo and Akershus and Lodz University of Technology [5]. The paper presents the Internet based ARS system, which was developed in the Institute of Applied Computer Science at TUL and introduced for teaching of the subject "Fundamentals of Computer Science” for the students of “Computer Science” course of study at WEEIA. The aim of the study described in the paper was to compare the results of students’ learning outcomes for the students taught with and without question based learning methodology and also a comparison of the results obtained for questions based learning implemented with and without clickers. A. Work with Clickers Clickers can play either a secondary or central role during a lecture. They can be incorporated into a standard lecture to increase interaction between students and lecturer or used as part of a significant change in teaching style that promotes active learning in class [6, 7]. They are extremely useful for activating students in large classrooms [8, 9].
Fig. 1: Interwrite clicker used at the WEEIA Faculty at TUL
The use of clickers, however, requires preparing new types of lecturing materials, e.g. the Power Point presentations including interactive elements, like questions and quizzes. Questions can have a single correct answer or be designed without any "right" answer in order to encourage debate and discussion. Some aspects of new
clickers style teaching materials ale presented in the next section. B. Typical Clickers Questions Typically, ARS questions are written before class as a part of preparing lecture notes. Lecturers can also add questions "on-the-fly" during class, but typically two to five questions per standard 45 minutes of lecture seem to be optimal [8]. There are many types of questions, which can be characterized in the following way. There can be questions: - to increase or manage interaction, through questions that: start or focus discussions [1] require interaction with peers [2] collect votes after a debate [3] - to find out more about students, by [8]: polling student opinions or attitudes probing students' pre-existing level of understanding asking how students feel about clickers and/or active learning - for diagnostic assessment, through questions that: assess students' understanding of material in the lecture [1] determine future direction of the lecture, including the level of detail needed test students' understanding of the previous lecture notes - for preparing for class or labs - to make lecture fun. Keeping in mind the three principal educational principles, i.e.: question based learning, active testing and feedback, one may come to conclusion, that use of clickers during classes can help in achieving these principles. During traditional lectures, some students do not dare to answer questions or participate in discussions. Clickers' answers are anonymous, so the students are encouraged to give the answer even if they are not confident of their choice. For lecturers immediate response about understanding difficult problems may be helpful to pay special attention to certain problems identified by the students [10, 11]. Also, a style of teaching changes. Talk, dialogue and dispute during lecture, often with enthusiasm and emotion, is important for motivation, processing of facts and reasons, and for understanding and memorizing material from class [12]. Clickers are ideally suited to bring about more student involvement through peer instruction or peer discussion. In this approach, teachers use clickers to survey student answers to a thought-provoking conceptual question [7]. If the classroom response system indicates a diversity of opinion, teachers give students several minutes to discuss the question with their neighbours in the lecture hall. It has long been known that teaching someone else helps to understand an idea. Duncan reports [7] that this relatively easy-to-implement technique can significantly increase student learning outcomes. Influence of clickers methodology for students’ learning outcomes was tested by many researchers and teachers for
different groups of students (of different size and age), for different education levels and disciplines [1-13]. They reported a positive [12], a small positive [9] or neutral [10] impact on learning outcomes on test scores. Some authors [12] cautioned that the clickers may not have been the reason for improvement in test scores and further research is necessary. Also, the methods of testing were different, i.e. by comparing the results for two [8] or more [9] independent groups of students taught the same subject parallel in different classes or by comparing the entrance examination scores with a final examination [12]. C. Clickers software at TUL A large number of clickers technical solutions, both hardware and software, are known [13] and one of their limitations is the cost of the lecture room equipment for the ARS system. The paper presents an Internet-based ARS application for learning support (for cell phone, tablet, PDA, laptop, PC etc.), which was developed at TUL. This software can be used in lecture rooms with Wi-Fi access and students can use their laptops or mobiles. The disadvantage of the presented Internet-based solution is, that not all students have laptops or other mobile devices. Nevertheless, they can participate in traditional question based learning without clickers or work together with their colleagues equipped with mobile devices. The developed interactive audio response system is based on Joomla content management system (CMS) and its JVoteSystem component. The software is installed in the Institute of Applied Computer Science at TUL on HP ProLiant DL180 server with Intel Quad-Core XEON E5620 Processor, 12GB RAM and 2TB HD. The server works under FreeBSD/amd64 operating system. It is connected into main network of TUL with fiber-optic cable of 1 Gb/s. The server supports the LAN with Fast Ethernet standard, equipped with CISCO components and connecting more than 220 workstations. It serves staff accounts, email and www. Wi-Fi access is available in the whole TUL campus via eduroam (education roaming) access service. Joomla is an award-winning open source CMS, which enables to build Web sites and powerful online applications in a short time. It was designed by the use of object oriented paradigms. Thanks to its module-based architecture Joomla is easy in use and highly extensible programming tool. Joomla uses server design pattern, which means that most of the data is processed on a Web server, and already formatted page is passed to the browser. This software architecture is particularly suitable for mobile applications. The developed software uses Joomla 2.5.6 with PHP 5.3, MySQL 5 data base and Apache 2 Web Server. Joomla extension JVoteSystem component was customized for use during lectures for interactive answering to questions, which were introduced to encourage students to more active participation in the lectures. General layout of the question panel for a student and a summary of the audience response for the lecturer are presented in Fig. 2.
a)
b)
Fig. 4: Examples of the interactive lecture slides with questions for Test C2
Answers are displayed on the right side of the slide after discussion with the audience and given answers. It appeared, that such a simple form of activity of students during lecture strongly increased their scores (see Table 2). Detailed discussion of assessment results is presented in the following section.
Fig. 2: Student question panel (a) and a summary of the audience response for the lecturer (b)
The questions were presented in a form allowing selection of one from four possible answers. The Joomla based ARS was used during lectures on “Fundamentals of Computer Science” given for the first course students. II. QUESTION BASED LEARNING The idea of question based learning behind clickers is not new. Teachers have used interactive, instructive questioning to teach students since at least the time of Socrates. This style of interaction, however, becomes very difficult as class size increases. This idea was introduced firstly without ARS in the lectures for Computer Science students in 2010. Fig. 3 & 4 show examples of lecture slides with questions.
A. Effects of question based learning Table 1 lists mean grades obtained by the students at “Fundamentals of Computer Science” course from the “Test C1" during last six years. Question based learning methodology described in the previous section (Fig. 3) was used in the first part of a semester. The Test C1 from C programming language was performed in the middle of the semester by the use of electronic colloquium system in the Intranet of the Institute of Applied Computer Science [14]. Fig. 5 shows distributions of grades of the students' groups in years 2010-2012. It can easily be seen, that mean grade has strongly decreased in years 2010-2012, also the number of the best grades (5) at that time was reduced. During the same period, the number of unsatisfactory grades (2) was almost doubled in years 2010-2011. One can pose an open question: is the general diminishing of grades a common tendency in higher technical education because students rely on commonly available lecturing materials and do not participate in lectures and therefore obtain lower grades? The answer is not clear, but perhaps clickers can avert this tendency. TABLE 1: STUDENTS’ MEAN GRADES FROM ”TEST C1” IN YEARS 2007 - 2012
Fig. 3: Examples of the interactive lecture slides with questions for Test C1.
Year
Mean Grade
Std. Dev
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
3,47 3,45 3,48 3,10 3,10 3,32
0,74 0,98 0,92 0,90 0,89 0,86
No. of students 157 130 155 160 168 171
Question based learning methodology was not used in the second part of the semester. It was introduced firstly without ARS in 2010 (Fig. 4) and with ARS system in 2012.
Fig. 5: The histogram of student grades of Test C1
Results of the C2 tests show significant influence of question based learning methodology introduced in 2010. As it can be seen from Table 2 mean grade raised from 2,55 to 3,81 – the best result in last 6 years. While, Fig. 6 shows, that use of clickers technology during lectures did not increase significantly students’ grades, but obtained notes were distributed more uniformly and there was more good and very good marks. TABLE 2: STUDENTS’ MEAN GRADES FROM ”TEST C2” IN YEARS 2007 - 2012
Year
Mean Grade
Std. Dev
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
2,92 0,83 2,61 0,86 2,55 0,77 3,81 1,00 3,53 1,01 3,60 0,98 2012 – lectures with clickers
No. of students 140 117 149 151 163 136
students groups in years 2010-2012, for which the mean grade on Test C1 has strongly decreased, the mean grade on Test C2 raised significantly, i.e. from 2,55 to 3,81. It proves that question based learning methodology has strongly improved students learning outcomes. Clickers technology for sure encourages students to active participation in the lectures. When it was introduced to the lecture, it was perceived by the students as a new and interesting solution. Nevertheless, some of the students complained about the need to attend the lectures with their notebooks. Consequently, at some classes only half of the students actively used the clickers system. The authors of the article will develop and enhance the Clickers system and introduce it to other lecturers. We hope, that this interactive teaching methodology will help to improve the quality of the teaching process. We hope also, that rapid development of technology will make the smartphones, that can play the role of Clickers, widely available among students. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors wish to thank Professor Reidar Kvadsheim for drawing attention to Clickers as the teaching methodology. REFERENCES [1]
[2] [3] [4]
[5]
[6] [7]
[8] [9]
Fig. 6: The histogram of student grades of Test C2
Despite a little influence on students’ grades, the Clickers methodology is a great help for a lecturer. Anonymous feedback from the lecture audience directs a lecturer to pay special attention to problems, which can pose difficulties for students. III. CONCLUSIONS The presented data about final grades obtained by students can lead to the following conclusions and thoughts. Comparing the results of Test C1 and Test C2 for the same groups of students it is well seen, that even for the
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