Hi Jennifer,
I would take Bill Goffe's approach: Don't show students the graph of responses unless doing so will encourage more discussion. The worst case graph is where 60% or so of students select the same answer and the rest of the students are evenly distributed among the other answers. The resulting graph has one very tall bar and lots of little ones. When students see this graph, it's easy for them to assume that the popular answer is the correct one, even though 40% of the students aren't on board.
I make it a practice to "mute" the projector screen (or switch it over to another computer if there's no "mute" button) before displaying the results graph. I take a look at the graph without showing it to the students. If I get a graph like the "worst case" I described above, I'll jump straight into the discussion without showing students the graph. On the other hand, if there are two or three answer choices that are popular, I *will* show students that graph. Seeing results like that tells students that the question is a tough one and worth discussing.
If you want to identify individual answers (which is easier with 13 teams than 100 students), then your clicker system might have some kind of pop-up window you can trigger that lists individual responses. I'm not familiar enough with eInstruction to know if they have something like this. This approach is what I've started calling "warm calling." It's not quite cold calling since you know how the student or team you call upon has answered and since they've had some time to think about the question. I blogged about warm calling a few weeks ago:
http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?cat=107
Best,
Derek
--
Derek Bruff, Ph.D.
Assistant Director, Center for Teaching
Senior Lecturer, Department of Mathematics
Vanderbilt University
www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/
www.derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/
twitter.com/derekbruff
-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer Imazeki [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, September 16, 2010 3:49 PM
Subject: simultaneous reporting and clickers
Hi all,
I use clickers to have teams submit their responses. After the
responses are in, I show the chart of responses. One challenge I've
had in a few cases is that when the large majority of teams select one
of the responses, then the few teams who select something else seem
quite reluctant to defend their choice. With the clickers, I can't
actually see who answered what (only the number selecting each
response) so I can't immediately call on the teams to explain their
choice. One thing in John's email yesterday caught my eye - he
mentioned having students hold up a colored card reflecting their
answers as well as submitting responses with clickers. But for some of
my questions, there are as many as 7 or 8 possible responses so I'd
have to make a lot of cards (and I worry a bit that reducing to just
four or five answer choices would make things too easy). My current
solution is to randomly select a team and ask them to say which
response they chose and explain why they thought that was the BEST
answer - and mostly, the other teams will then chime in. But if
anyone has other ideas, I'd appreciate hearing them...
Jennifer
****************************
Jennifer Imazeki
Department of Economics
San Diego State University
homepage: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~jimazeki/
Economics for Teachers blog: http://economicsforteachers.blogspot.com
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