Creating Times for Telling with Clicker Questions?

At that How People Learn workshop yesterday, I shared the idea of asking clicker questions you expect a good number of students to answer incorrectly as a way to create a “time for telling” where students are ready to hear and understand an explanation or mini-lecture on a particular topic. This is a pretty standard use of clickers and one that I describe in all of my workshops on teaching with clickers.

Yesterday, however, this use of a clicker question struck at least one person in the room as a de-motivation. Her read on the idea (or perhaps the experience of it, since I used the technique during the workshop) was that it communicated the message to students that they’re ignorant and the professor has all the right answers.

Maybe I just botched my use of this technique in the workshop (and thereby giving her the wrong impression), but, like I’ve said, I talk about this technique a lot, and I’ve never heard this criticism of it. The “time for telling” idea itself comes from a good source (Daniel Schwartz and John Bransford), but perhaps the use of that idea with clickers is more complicated than I thought.

What’s your take on asking students clicker questions you expect them to answer incorrectly as a way of creating times for telling? Ever hear any pushback on that as counterproductive? (For a few thoughts on these questions, check out the discussion over on Google Plus.)

Image: “doh,” by hobvias sudoneighm, Flickr (CC)

3 Responses to "Creating Times for Telling with Clicker Questions?"

Britt says:

August 4, 2011 at 2:33 pm

I definitely use clicker questions in physics and astronomy that I expect students to get wrong. My favorite type of question, in fact, is one where I get give a multiple-choice question with 4 choices, and 25% of students choose each one. These are usually conceptual questions that ask students to apply principles that they are learning.

However, I don’t tell students the right answer. I ask them to find someone near to them who answered differently, and try to convince that student that they are right—and allow the other student to convince them of their own answer. While the students are debating, I move through the classroom, answering clarifying questions, listening to the many discussions, and offering additional questions to guide students toward the right answer.

Typically, students will arrive at the correct answer without having to get a lecture from me.

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Joss Ives says:

August 5, 2011 at 11:41 am

Bret brought this up in the google+ chat, but I wanted to add something to it.

Bret said: “I think that she might have a point if most of the questions you ask end up stumping the students. I could easily see students get frustrated: “We are doing clicker questions again, so now it is time for all of us to be wrong again.”“

And then when on to discuss why this is a poor use of clickers (a point with which I agree).

My experience is that you get pockets of weaker students that feel “it’s time for us to be wrong again” every time you start the timer even if there are plenty of questions that get better than 80% correct responses in the first voting sequence. I mention below two different (but similar) strategies that I use that should be able to help with the weaker students, but I still find that I have small pockets of exasperated students that always feel “it’s time for us to be wrong again”.

I often use the OSU clicker question sequences which, among other things, build toward challenging clicker questions on a concept by stepping through some easier ones first.

I also like the idea of trying to set them up to build on what they know, where you first set them up to answer a question where their intuition will lead them to correct answer and then give them something that will stretch the limits of their current mental model. Of course it’s no small task developing these types of sequences and there are always many surprises along the way.

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Marcus Dickson says:

August 6, 2011 at 9:08 pm

It has to depend on the context. In Psychology, when we focus on problem-solving, one of the learning objectives is to understand the many types of errors humans tend to make. I use clicker questions (often in a peer instruction format) in which the vast majority of the students will get it wrong, and it is *supposed* to be a gotcha question — specifically to demonstrate how easily we are led astray. Without the personal experience of problem-solving errors, students are skeptical that they are so easily misled.

Example: “A man buys a horse for $60, then sells the horse for $70. He then buys back the exact same horse for $80, and then sells it again for $90. How much did he make in the horse-selling business?” The majority of students will say he made $10, though he actually made $20. They are misled by the fact that he bought back the same horse. I expect them to get this wrong, and following the peer discussion discussion time and revealing the correct answer, they get a little more time to talk about what led them to the error. They almost always identify the “same horse” issue as the cause of the error.

In other contexts, a question in which most of the students will get it wrong might be less helpful. But it may simply be a tough, rigorous question — not a “gotcha” question. Asking only questions we are sure most people will get right, in order to avoid them feeling as if the professor is trying to show them up, is a pretty sure way to avoid asking the most difficult questions, and that is exactly the opposite of what we want.

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