Research Assistant Professor
Michigan Technological University, MI
Teaching Development
Mentored Teaching Project
Improving Student Engagement and Understanding of Broad Themes Using Poll Everywhere
Michigan State University
I taught the laboratory portion of the Introductory Geology course at Michigan State University during the fall semesters of 2017 and 2018. You can learn more about the course here. This course is commonly taken by students in related fields such as environmental engineering or environmental sustainability, policy, management, or science, with a small proportion of students actually being majors within the department.
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I noticed during the first semester I taught this course that student engagement with the material and with the "big picture" themes was somewhat lacking. Students were reluctant to participate during the pre-lab lectures that introduced the topic for each day.
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Word cloud of student responses to an interactive question in class
Based on this, I wanted to see how implementing interactive technology could improve student engagement.
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During the fall semester of 2018 I taught two sections of the lab. In one of the sections, pre-lab lectures were presented in a traditional manner throughout the whole semester. In the other section, I introduced interactive questions to the lectures using Poll Everywhere half-way through the semester. I created surveys that the students completed half-way through the semester and at the end of the semester to assess the role pre-lab activities and lectures played in how prepared students felt for lab activities and how well they understood the content.
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Results from the surveys indicated that students felt less prepared for lab activities and less confident with lab material during the first half of the semester as compared to the second half. There was no significant difference in how well prepared students felt for lab between lab sections that had traditional style lectures vs. interactive lectures. While students did comment that the "quiz questions" helped clarify topics and provide more structure, it seems that increased understanding and engagement with the lab course corresponded with increased overlap of topics covered in class as the semester came to an end.
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Overview of Interactive Questions Used
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