Hi Christine,
Your guesses about how students are cheating with clickers might be on target, but my guess would be that some students are letting their friends bring their clickers to class to make it seem like they're attending, when they're not really there. With at least 70 students in the course, it's possible you wouldn't notice if a few of them weren't there but their clickers said they were.
This is the form of cheating with clickers I hear the most about, and I can imagine that students to make the effort to come to class find it pretty annoying that students who skip can cheat in this way. You can see a few ideas for dealing with this kind of cheating on my blog:
http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=507
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: Bradetich, Judi [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 7:51 AM
Subject: Re: clickers and cheating in TBL
I don't completely understand the motivation behind cheating, and it is very disappointing to have so many students actually admit to it - or to knowing about it - you are not alone!
My immediate response to cheating is that it is really only hurting the cheaters themselves - it is between "them and God" - are the iRAT's graded heavily? Maybe changing the weight of the grading would help... and having a few non-group, non-clicker tests that are carefully monitored to ferret out the slackers...Ultimately, we want the students to learn, so if it helps them learn, maybe we need to think like Vygotsky, and be glad the students are helping each other out - even during a test (?)....
Judi Bradetich, M.S., M.M.
Lecturer, Development and Family Studies
Dept. of Educational Psychology
University of North Texas
________________________________________
From: Team-Based Learning [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Christine Kuramoto [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2010 12:08 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: clickers and cheating in TBL
Hi Everyone,
In my last TBL class evaluations by students, I had some disappointing
responses to the item "Cheating is no problem in this class." Only 8
students agreed, 26 said they were unsure, and 37 said they disagreed.
I was using clickers, so I got the responses right away and was able to
ask each team to write suggestions for solving the cheating problem. I
got several suggestions that said "stop using clickers."
I had been using clickers on the iRATs for the first time in this
course. I can only guess at why using clickers might have made it easier
to cheat. I'm thinking that in the process of clicking in answers it
may have been possible for students to send text messages via cell
phones to other students without being noticed. Or maybe it was just
easy to see what answers other students around them were clicking.
Perhaps students in other countries would be more explicit about how the
cheating was taking place, but here the students are only vague. Even
those that are angry about the unfairness of cheating are unwilling to
"rat out" their peers by telling me clearly how the cheating is taking
place.
I'm not sure if I should just stop using the clickers for the iRATs or
not. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Christine
--
*******
Christine Kuramoto, Assistant Professor: Medical English
Kyushu University, Department of Medical Education
Faculty of Medical Sciences
3-1-1 Maidashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, 812-8582 Japan
Phone: (+81)92-642-6186 Fax: (+81)92-642-6188
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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