I have found using online quizzes a good way to teach maths to beginners, because it is a good way to test whether students have understood you. Sometimes particularly as maths is seen as a “scary” subject to those who are not confident, this means students will not necessarily put up their hand if they do not understand something, even if prompted to do so by the lecturer. Often when asking the students questions, only a few more confident students will answer, as so it is hard to engage the majority of the class. I found that, because online quizzes are anonymous, students are happy to participate in them, and it is easier to find out if there is a topic that was not understood. This allows the teacher to adjust their teaching, based on the students understanding, which in (Beatty, 2006) is referred to as agile learning.
Using such quizzes is known to increase student participation, attendance, and student enjoyment of classes (Bruff 2009). It is a good way of engaging with the whole class, instead of just the more confident members, as was found in (Strasser, 2010) in teaching calculus. A downside was that students without laptops/ smartphones could not take part, although I did not find this to be a problem when I tried it, as all students had at least one of the two. Using student’s own smartphones/ laptops instead of clickers solves the logistical problem of distributing them, and does not require an extra financial cost. However, it did take more time than expected to set up and ensure all students were added to the group, as listed as a disadvantage in (Strasser, 2010). Also, sometimes multiple-choice questions do not give a good indication that the student has understood the question in depth. Another potential downside of the quizzes is it might be possible to misinterpret the results. For example, if a particularly difficult question is asked on a certain topic, it may not necessarily mean the students don’t understand the topics if they can’t answer the question.
Next year I might take this further and look into anonymous methods for students to feedback topics they have not understood, so I can spend more time on these, perhaps using an online forum. I may also start using the anonymous quizzes for answering exercises, to encourage students to volunteer answers. I also will combine the quizzes with joint work, as suggested in (Beatty, 2006).
Beatty, Ian D., et al. "Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching." American Journal of Physics 74.1 (2006): 31-39.
Bruff, Derek. Teaching with classroom response systems: Creating active learning environments. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.
Strasser, Nora. "Who wants to pass math? Using clickers in calculus." Journal of College Teaching and Learning7.3 (2010): 49.