Personal Response Systems Enhance Learning
by Malcolm Montgomery
An innovative and clever adaptation of a familiar technology is changing the way students and teachers interact in the classroom, with everyone coming out as a winner.
New educational tools called Personal Response Systems (PRS) let students participate actively in even the largest class by giving real-time feedback about the topic being presented or discussed. PRS technology is based on the familiar TV remote, which controls an ordinary television set by sending coded pulses of invisible infrared light to change the channel and adjust the volume. In a PRS classroom, each student has a handheld device (called a responder or transmitter) that resembles a TV remote. The student presses buttons to answer questions posed by the instructor. Infrared sensors installed around the room pick up the signals from the responders and send them to a computer that instantly records and summarizes the students' feedback. The instructor immediately sees the class response as a histogram on his or PC, and can judge how well students understand the material. Even wrong answers can be helpful, because they may help target the source of misunderstanding.
In addition to helping the instructor teach better, PRS directly benefit students' learning by actively engaging them in the learning process. In very small classes, students may participate easily by raising their hands and speaking out, and may also tend to stay more engaged, knowing that they may be called upon to comment at any time. But in larger classes, interaction is more difficult and communication tends to become one-way, from teacher to student. PRS provide a "reverse channel" to allow students to give feedback to instructors.
Many student users report that they enjoy PRS classes more and stay more alert because they come to class with the expectation of participating actively. Learning becomes easier, and many students feel more confident about the material when they receive immediate affirmation for answering correctly. What's more, the anonymity of the process relieves the social anxiety many students feel when asked to demonstrate their knowledge in front of their classmates. Individual responses are normally not displayed to the whole class, although it is possible to track them to take attendance, give a quiz, or measure class participation.
The use of PRS in teaching is not limited to simple multiple-choice or true-false objective testing for comprehension. Though the simple keypad system limits the complexity of responses, instructors may pose questions that ask for an opinion and display the resulting histogram for class discussion. Students choosing one or another point of view might be asked to offer their reasoning (and perhaps they will do so more readily since they have proof they are not alone). After some lively debate, the question might be repeated to see whether attitudes have changed. Another instructional method is to present questions for discussion in small groups, with each group tasked with coming to a consensus before reporting back via PRS. This approach requires students to argue persuasively and exercise group decision-making skills. Some of the current instructors using PRS are studying ways in which the technology can enhance the value of group discussion as a pedagogical tool. The response data that PRS capture can be saved for analysis or uploaded into BlackBoard for attendance or grading. UC's Blackboard team (part of the Faculty Technology Resources Center) has created an easy link for students to use to register their responders, making it easy for instructors to match up the data with the individuals.
More than 900 students are using UC's Personal Response Sytem this quarter, up from about 80 in the fall. The number of classes instructors are teaching with PRS has tripled from 3 to 9. The dramatic increase is due to the successful results experienced by the early adopters, coupled with a collaborative marketing approach by makers of response systems and textbook publishers. By bundling the two educational products together, they have brought a new technology to the attention of instructors and helped cut the cost of providing it. The UC Bookstore is participating in the buy-back program. Most students can expect to pay about $10 for a responder bundled with a textbook. Responders may also be purchased separately for about $35, and can be sold back when no longer needed for about $20. Under this plan, the net cost to a student is about $15, regardless of how many courses or quarters the responder is used. Compared with the cost of other educational items (such as calculators and the textbooks themselves), a PRS gives a lot of pedagogical bang for the buck.
To present questions to students, instructors in a UCit Electronic Classroom may use the built-in data projector and computer (or plug in their own laptops). To gather student responses, you will need additional equipment, as one or more infrared receivers must be attached to the PC and you need special software loaded.
Only a few rooms have the receivers now, but with the help of Classroom Scheduling, many classes are being moved to these locations. Electronic Classroom Support Services (ECSS) supports PRS users and will install receivers in more rooms as demand increases.
Instructors create question slides either in PowerPoint or using display software supplied by the responder manufacturer. The manufacturer's software is license-free, but a little tricky to use. A third-party vendor, Turning Technologies, has created a very user-friendly PowerPoint add-in called TurningPoint, which makes PRS much easier to use. Creating a question slide and a follow-up slide to display the responses as a graph is quite easy for anyone who already uses PowerPoint. The TurningPoint license has limits on the number of rooms and the number of students per room that can be accommodated, however. Instructional and Research Computing (IRC) is working with the vendor to find an affordable way to expand the number of students and instructors served.
For more information about using PRS in your classes, please contact the Faculty Technology Resources Center (6-1602), or Electronic Classroom Planning Services (6-6689).
You may send email to the author at Malcolm.Montgomery@UC.Edu.
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