An Active Learning Technique Enhanced with Electronic Polls

Abstract

Only very few students answer questions like: Did you understand this? , Do you have any questions? etc. In this paper, we present an active learning technique that is based on the think-pair-share technique improved with the introduction of electronic polls to obtain anonymous instant feedback from the students. Electronic polls have been usually performed using Classroom Response Systems, but these systems introduce several problems related to the excessive cost of the systems and the technical problems that they may cause to the instructors. Thus, we have implemented our active learning technique using an Interaction System that provides the benefits of supporting electronic polls but avoids the problems of Classroom Response Systems. We also present an example of how we applied our proposal to a set of Operating System lectures. Finally, we evaluate our proposal and demonstrate that the results we obtain are very similar to the ones obtained in the existing CRS literature without the problems that they introduce.