Podcast #1 – An Interview with Ian Beatty
As I was researching my book, I interviewed dozens of college and university faculty members as a way to discover best practices regarding teaching with classroom response systems. I learned a lot from these interviews, so I’m going to continue doing them and share them as podcasts on this blog.
This episode features an interview with Ian Beatty, a research assistant professor at the Scientific Reasoning Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Ian has a background in physics education research, and he’s published several great articles with his research partners on teaching with clickers. I met Ian at the recent clickers conference at the University of Louisville.
In this interview, Ian describes the pedagogy he and his research group use and study, a pedagogy they call Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment, or TEFA. He discusses the role of clickers in this pedagogy and shares some advice on writing good clicker questions. He also addresses the “coverage” question I hear a lot-how can an instructor “cover” the course content while making time for active learning in the classroom? Ian also talks about his current project exploring how high school teachers learn to use the TEFA approach.
Click the following link to download and listen to the interview:
Podcast #1 – An Interview with Ian Beatty [31:54]
Links:
- Ian Beatty’s Home Page
- Teacher Learning of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment, Ian’s current project
Papers:
- Beatty, I., Gerace, W., Leonard, W., & Dufresne, R. (2006). Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching. American Journal of Physics, 74(1), 31-39.
- Beatty, I., Leonard, W., Gerace, W., & Dufresne, R. (2006). Question driven instruction: Teaching science (well) with an audience response system. In Banks, D. A. (Ed.), Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.