Using classroom response systems to foster students' active engagement with statistics

Classroom response systems (CRS) enable quick fun interventions that engage students in active learning. Students generally are enthusiastic, enjoying the participation and interactions. More broadly CRS can be used to individually quiz students in class, encouraging them to prepare properly. Their collective responses to multiple choice questions can be displayed as bar charts, prompting discussions and enabling the academic to identify possible areas of weakness or misunderstanding. Answers to open-ended questions encourage students to write about statistics. Activities developed for students to work through on paper, such as the class activity developed by Allan Rossman and Beth Chance “What Makes the Standard Deviation Larger or Smaller?”, can be easily converted to a CRS activity encouraging students to answer themselves prior to discussing in small groups.

You will get an overview of the practical use of a number free CRS in the introductory statistics college classroom including: using Socrative for classroom teacher-paced quizzes and online self-paced quizzes with immediate feedback; using Kahoot for fun, competitive quizzes based upon prior readings as part of a flipped learning approach; using Quizlet to reduce cognitive load by encourage mastery of basic statistical terminology through online activities prior to class and a live classroom group activity based upon these term. Some examples of classroom activities using free versions of Socrative, Kahoot and Quizlet are shared below:

Socrative quiz (self-paced): https://api.socrative.com/rc/URWikP
Kahoot! quiz on Samples: https://play.kahoot.it/#/k/b8a3edc6-2184-424f-8450-b602082fa9b8
Quizlet set on Sampling: https://quizlet.com/_4l75pm