A Few Clicker Questions from the Sciences

I’m guest-teaching in a graduate-level course on college science teaching this morning. The instructor, Erika Grundstrom, asked me to talk with her students about teaching with clickers. Below you’ll find the Prezi I’m using, one that includes a few examples of clicker questions from the sciences. The usual suspects are present (misconception questions, student perspective questions, one-best-answer questions), but so are a few other types of clicker questions, including what I like to call representation translation questions (ones that ask students to translate between different ways to represent a concept or process) and variable relationship questions (ones that require students to analyze the relationships among variables in a key equation or formula).

For more ideas on designing clicker questions in the sciences, check out this great article by Ian Beatty and colleagues:

• 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.

Aside: I post most of my Prezis here on the blog not to spam my regular blog readers, but so that I can tell people at the start of my talks and workshops that my “slides” can be found on my website. This heads of the common question “Can I get a copy of your slides?” and, more importantly, frees participants from the need to take lots of notes.

Image: “Macro,” me, Flickr (CC)