21 The Effect of Using Polling Application on Class Participation and the Learning Process
Ahmad Salman, ISAT
Abstract Polling applications such as Kahoot, Quizlet, and Google Classroom are gaining a lot of popularity when surveying audience in events , meetings, and classroom. The reason is mainly because of the ease of use for the users and the convenience these tools provide since they provide mobile applications with a simple user interface. One application in specific stands out among polling applications is Poll Everywhere because of its wide variety of methods to represent questions and surveys making it a very popular tool to use in academia and class room participation. In this project I will study the effect of using the Poll Everywhere application on student participation and their learning experience in class.
Rationale Professors spend a fair amount of time lecturing in a classroom and they measure the effectiveness of their teaching through homework, assignments, quizzes and other forms. These methods do not give educators immediate feedback on whether their lecturing points are clearly being passes through to the students or not. Class participation is a good method to get immediate feedback by asking questions related to the lecture, staring a discussion, and creating small exercise. However, asking oral questions in the classroom would not test the understanding of every student, as not everyone would raise their hand to answer a question and even out of those who do, not all of them would have the correct answer. Additionally, student might be shy or nervous to speak out loud in front of other students which makes it hard for them to participate. Polling applications have a solution to this issue as educators as they provide an easy method to test the learning ability of every student by creating questions that quiz students on lecture material and voice their opinion on topics discussed in class. Poll Everywhere application in specific is one of the best among these apps for the following reasons:
– The application is very professional and has multiple ways to ask a question through different visual aids
– Students do not need to buy extra hardware, they can download the applications on their phones and use it in class when a question is asked
– Students always have their phones, so they will not miss class exercises
– Poll Everywhere integrates directly into PowerPoint so the questions are part of the slide presentation.
– The answers are stored in . CSV files which can be used to analyze the progress of each student and perform other statistical analysis
Not only will the use of an application such as Poll Everywhere would increase class participation, it would also make the students more alert in class and more engaging with the material as preliminary results have shown.
Instructional design and implementation plan:I have been using Poll Everywhere application in two classes for the past year, The Introduction to Telecommunication, Networking, and Security (ISAT 215) and Introduction to Programming and Problem
Solving (ISAT 252) to increase student participation in class and test their understanding of the material. Questions such as “what are the two ways of multiplexing in a circuit-switched network?” or “What is the size of a MAC address in bits and in hex?” would pop-up on the slides and the students would get the chance to answer these questions from their smartphones. The answer from each student would appear on the projector’s screen and that would give me the percentage of students who got the answers right and understood the material and would also give me a chance to correct a wrong answer which provides students with immediate feedback on their performance and provide me with immediate feedback on how effective my lesson was. The analysis of the student’s performance can be further studied as their answers are being logged and saved on my Poll Everywhere account. Statistical analysis can reveal if there is a correlation between class participation and questions answered correctly on a quiz, which topics are hard on students and I can then divide them among multiple lectures instead of having them condensed in a single lecture, and they can also reveal the overall effectiveness of using polling applications in the learning process.
Based on the feedback I received from the student’s course evaluations, it appeared that this method has been very effective.
It can be shown that the students appreciate the usage of the application in the classroom and from the small amount of statistical analysis performed on the data I have collected for the past year, I can see that there is evidence that support the effectiveness of these tools in the classroom but further analysis is required. My idea is to implement the usage of the Poll Everywhere app in all of the three classes I’m teaching in the spring and fall and perform statistical analysis on all the data that has been collected over the course of two years. The following would be the outline for the plan:
- – Create the polling questions for each of the classes I’m teaching ( ISAT 252, ISAT 390 and ISAT
361) to be used during class.
- – Make sure that the questions are created in a variety of visual representations (multiple questions, pop-up, image clickable, Survey … etc.) which are provided through Poll Everywhere
- – Collect and analyze the data from all three classes and perform different statistical analysis on them
- – Present the data to colleagues in the department and show the analysis
- – Publish the work in a peer reviewed conference and present it
Innovative and creative teaching outcomes:
This method has already shown a very good potential in increasing class participation and students’ learning experience and I would like to study the process in more details to maximize its effectiveness and point out its drawbacks if any. The following is a summary of the learning outcomes
- – Increase class participation and get students to be more engaged in class
- – Providing students with immediate feedback on their performance and understanding in class
- – Create a method to providing feedback to the instructor on the level of hardness of the lecture material.
- – Increase participation of shy and anxious students in class by giving them a platform they are comfortable with
Plan for result dissemination
The data collected over the course of two years will be studied, analyzed and presented to faculty in the ISAT department. It will also be submitted for publishing in a conference proceeding and presented in it.
