Kirkwood-Watts Dana L, Bremers Emily K, Robinson Emily A, Brazeal Kathleen R, Couch Brian A
School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA.
J Microbiol Biol Educ. 2022 Jul 6;23(2). doi: 10.1128/jmbe.00038-22. eCollection 2022 Aug.
Clicker questions are a commonly used active learning technique that stimulates student interactions to help advance understanding of key concepts. Clicker questions are often administered with an initial vote, peer discussion, and a second vote, followed by broader classroom explanation. While clickers can promote learning, some studies have questioned whether students maintain this performance on later exams, highlighting the need to further understand how student answer patterns relate to their understanding of the material and to identify ways for clickers to benefit a broader range of students. Systematic requizzing of concepts during at-home assignments represents a promising mechanism to improve student learning. Thus, we paired clicker questions with at-home follow-up reflections to help students articulate and synthesize their understandings. This pairing of clickers with homework allowed us to decipher how student answer patterns related to their underlying conceptions and to determine if revisiting concepts provided additional benefits. We found that students answering both clicker votes correctly performed better on isomorphic exam questions and that students who corrected their answers after the first vote did not show better homework or exam performance than students who maintained an incorrect answer across both votes. Furthermore, completing the follow-up homework assignment modestly boosted exam question performance. Our data suggest that longer-term benefits of clickers and associated homework may stem from students having repeated opportunities to retrieve, refine, and reinforce emerging conceptions.
课堂应答问题是一种常用的主动学习技巧，它能激发学生互动，以帮助加深对关键概念的理解。课堂应答问题通常先是进行一次投票，然后进行同伴讨论，接着再进行一次投票，之后是更广泛的课堂讲解。虽然课堂应答器有助于促进学习，但一些研究对学生在后续考试中能否保持这种表现提出了质疑，这凸显了进一步了解学生答题模式与他们对材料理解之间的关系以及确定让更多学生受益于课堂应答器的方法的必要性。在家庭作业中对概念进行系统性的重新测验是一种有望提高学生学习效果的机制。因此，我们将课堂应答问题与家庭后续反思相结合，以帮助学生阐述和综合他们的理解。将课堂应答问题与家庭作业相结合，使我们能够解读学生的答题模式与他们潜在概念之间的关系，并确定重温概念是否能带来额外的益处。我们发现，两次课堂应答投票都答对的学生在同构考试问题上表现更好，而且在第一次投票后改正答案的学生在家庭作业或考试中的表现并不比两次投票都答错的学生更好。此外，完成后续家庭作业适度提高了考试问题的成绩。我们的数据表明，课堂应答问题和相关家庭作业的长期益处可能源于学生有反复的机会来检索、完善和强化新出现的概念。
