Wondering more about the image quiz activity type inside of LectureTools? Here are four ways to use these activities that might fit in with your class:
Test for Understanding with Basic Identification Questions
Basic recall questions are great for checking whether your students remember important information they will need going forward. These types of questions are related to multiple choice questions written to test vocabulary or recollection of simple facts. In the image quiz context, students would be presented with an image and would simply have to click on the point representing the correct answer.
A biology class might quiz students on where the nucleoid is in a diagram of a cell, while a history or geography class might quiz students on which country the Netherlands is on a blank map. This allows you to make sure students are remembering key information that is essential for new material that requires students to build on "old" material.
Encourage Critical Thinking with Multi-Dimensional Questions
Unlike basic identification questions, multi-dimensional image quizzes require students to do more than recall certain pieces of information. Instead, these questions have students engage with material in class that requires them to identify the appropriate concept and apply it to a problem they have never seen before.
Asking students in a biology class where in the cell ATP is produced, for example, may require them to remember both that mitochondria produce this energy as well as where they can find a mitochondrion in a cell. In a class about weather, showing students an aerial image and asking them where they would expect temperatures to be the hottest requires them to understand what conditions cause hotter surface temperatures to make an educated guess. These questions are more conceptual in nature, and are a great way to test whether students are making the bridge between reading information in a textbook and being able to apply it to a variety of situations.
Spark Discussion with Spectrum Questions
Open your class up to spectrum of possibilities, rather than confining it to a predetermined set of multiple choice answers. Spectrums can range from a simple strongly-agree-to-strongly-disagree scale to more philosophical or theoretical spectrums specifically drawn from course material.
We’ve already written about how Mika LaVaque-Manty, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, uses LectureTools to pose questions geared towards humanities. Most notably, he used the image quiz feature to present a timeline to his students and ask them, in their opinion, when the United States became a democracy. The question generated a discussion, as some students chose important historical dates like the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage, or the Civil Rights Act. Other students indicated that the US had not yet achieved this ideal. Open-ended questions such as these force students to think on their own and to develop arguments for a wide portfolio of choices. Spectrum questions have no correct answer, but rather, force students to think critically in the context of your course. They are also great for preparing students for exams with open-ended essay prompts.
Introduce New Concepts with In-Class Experiments
Student response systems need not only test students’ knowledge. They can also introduce brand new concepts like regression. A blank set of axes with two defined variables makes for a great image quiz question, as students can plot their data point. The results of the activity would then be the aggregation of the entire class’s data, which could be a good way to introduce regression as a way to measure correlation by drawing a line of best fit and labeling the β and error terms.
Have another idea for image quiz questions? Leave your idea in the comments!
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