Uncovering Student Misconceptions about Wellness Issues

I just ran across an interesting interview with Linda Hancock, director of the Wellness Resource Center at Virginia Commonwealth University.  In the interview, she describes her use of clickers during sessions for incoming first-year undergraduates.  For example…

So I can take a group of 300 freshmen and say “How many people do you think smoke daily?” and they think everybody’s smoking cigarettes because smokers are always standing out front of the buildings. “How many of you are daily smokers?” It’s like seven to eight percent.

This is a great combination of a student experience question (“Are you a daily smoker?”) with a prediction question (“How many of your peers are daily smokers?”).  The student experience question alone would have some impact, but that impact is magnified by the prediction question.  This technique is also used by Resa Walch and Amanda Tapler, two Elon University health sciences instructors I interviewed for my book.

In the interview, Linda Hancock goes on to provide another example and to note that the immediacy of the data collected via clickers helps it have more impact.