Audio response system

When do we use ARS?

The utter most typical use is to increase or manage interaction. That can be done through questions that:

• start or focus discussions (Jackson and Trees, 2003)
• require interaction with peers (Knight and Wood, 2005)
• collect votes after a debate (Draper, 2002)

One other reason can be to assess student preparation and ensure accountability, through surveying students’ thoughts about the pace, effectiveness, style, or topic of lecture. it can be away of polling student opinions or attitudes.

Third reason can be for formative assessement.

• probing students’ pre-existing level of understanding
• assess students’ understanding of material in lecture
• reveal student misunderstandings of lecture that can determine future direction of lecture, including the level of detail needed

Forth, for quizzes or tests (Draper, 2002) although reports of using clickers for summative high-stakes testing are relatively rare. Quiz questions typically check whether students are:

• paying attention
• taking good notes
• actively thinking
• able to recall material from previous lectures

6. to guide thinking, review, or teach, including questions used to:

• Ask them to define relevance in a subject
• review at the end of lecture
• lead students through a multistep process by asking which step should come next (Wood, 2004)

Last but not least to make lecture fun.

The Concept in three steps

1. Individual.

Everyone have an opportunity to think by them selves and formulate an answer/question. This step is important to include not only the verbal participants.

2. Small group

The small group get to convince each other of the "right" answer. Research by Eric Mazur has shown this to be more effective than teacher led explainations.

3. Big group

Formative. Here you can see how you relate to the big group and the individuals create together a collaborative answer with the possibility for multi-perspectives

Technology

There are a lot of different services to use as ARS. Experiences we have done is that you need to think what you would like the students/ participants to experience. What type of cognition would you like them to train? What kind of activity are you searching from. Is it only Multiple choice or would you like them to develop a world cloud, or rate questions that are more or less important to them?

One other thing is how many people you would like to participate at once. The different services can limit that.

But the main factor is that it needs to be accessible. Easy to use for the users.

Below we have gathered three of the most popular services at the time. There might be more out there!