Using Electronic Voting and Feedback: Developing HOT skills inlearners

Presenter: Dr Trevor Barker

Institution: University of Hertfordshire

Theme: Evidence of effective use of technologies in teaching for students learning

Students cohort 1: 55 M level Computing students

Student cohort 2: 250 year 1 computing students

Issue: Students are poor at using higher level thinking skills and connecting disparate parts of the course together in a finish piece of software

Overview of process cohort 1:

1.    Produce a piece of software to a given criteria in a team of 2

2.    All pieces are shown and all students mark them using the criteria and ‘clickers’

3.    The accumulated mark from this makes up 20% of their final mark.

4.    They are also given a small mark depending how close they are to the tutors mark

Extensive research was undertaken to find evidence of tactical marking. Non was found, but poor students tended to be further way from tutors mark.

Overview of process cohort 2:

1.    Students used clickers to mark past students work (websites) in a lecture session.

2.    (not totally sure about this) They were given a mark for how close they were to tutors mark

The result of this was a 6% increase in marks for the end of module assessment.

Abstract:

The work described in this paper relates to research undertaken at the University of Hertfordshire with a group of 240 first year undergraduates following a Computer Science / Information Technology module in Electronic Media Design. An important objective of this module is the development and evaluation of online multimedia materials by learners. This is measured in a final practical assessment under exam conditions. Previously the module delivery team had experienced difficulty in achieving this objective. Assignments such as this assess a range of skills including screen design, usability, human computer interaction, multimedia presentation and programming. It was evident that many learners were not engaging deeply with the work and for that reason the quality of the materials produced was not as high as we would have liked. Our hypothesis was that despite our efforts, some learners were failing to internalize the criteria relating to the quality of such artifacts. It was not that learners were unable to produce the required standard, they were not clear as to the issues and criteria involved. For this reason we decided to change our approach to the assignment by using an electronic voting system (EVS). We used this in a session where we presented examples of systems produced in previous years. Students marked the work and compared their marks with the mark awarded by the tutor. A great deal of discussion followed (often heated), both during the session and on the discussion forum of the MLE. Students were engaging deeply with the issues and discussing the criteria. Examples of this discussion will be presented in the paper. Statistical analysis of the results of the assignment compared to previous cohorts showed a significant increase of over 6%. Anecdotally we agreed that the quality of the work had improved greatly. Details of this work, statistical analysis and possible reasons for the improvement will be discussed in the paper.