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Case study: What works (for me) in Chemistry

Department of Chemistry
Nick Wood

Nick Wood (Department of Chemistry) provides some insights into his own journey with Mentimeter, highlighting the different ways in which he finds it to be useful and less useful in support of his teaching. He takes us through a number of examples showing how he makes use of the tool for:

  • Breaking the ice with a new group, for example at the beginning of the academic year or on UCAS visit days;
  • Starting sessions with a check on understanding, a practice he finds to be particularly important and useful where modules are built on expectations of pre-requisite knowledge;
  • Testing student understanding of a simple example in a lecture. Nick was clear that he finds it important to focus on relatively straightforward questions in lectures and to give students time to consider responses and to make sure that it contributes positively to building understanding rather than uncovering issues that cannot realistically be addressed in the time available;
  • Gauging subjective ideas such as student confidence in a topic which can be answered quickly on “gut feeling”. He gave a useful example of how self-assessment questionnaires following a pass-fail lab safety test provided a useful vehicle for reflection and addressed anxieties in the cohort;
  • Eliciting formative feedback from students on teaching. Nick described how successful this has been as a means of gathering feedback after tutorials or in other sessions that fall outside the normal channels for module evaluation.

Offering reflections on what he has learned from using Mentimeter over the last few years, Nick emphasises that he is now less likely to use polling in lectures for complex questions or where student understanding is likely to be incomplete as this can be counterproductive both for those who get the answer right and those who get it wrong. These types of questions he tends to reserve for smaller group sessions where there is more time to explore the concept and address misconceptions. He also gives some insights into what he sees as the ideal frequency and timing of use, suggesting that it is most usefully deployed in lectures immediately after explaining a key basic concept or in the second half of a lecture to give an active break and change of pace. Finally, he advises users to have a back up plan for when questions reveal fundamental misconceptions using the VLE to provide supplementary notes or screen recordings to ensure that these can be addressed.

Watch their presentation:

What works (for me) in Chemistry (Panopto viewer) (15 mins 15 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So my name's Nick, I'm from the Department of Chemistry and I've called this What works and what doesn't work with for me is the rider. I think we all understand that Mentimeter is a tool and we can we use it individually for these things or those things or the other things. And I don't think it's - we obviously we all know this there's not one right way to do it to do this, but it's something that I know some of my colleagues, I'm probably one of the people use most of my department, but lots of people use it a little bit, although I think with things like the multiple choice and open text, those are more things. I try to do some more. I try to use some of that, some of the more varied question types, if I can, to to, to try to keep things fresh. So I'm just going to yeah, just talk about my experience of using it I guess the last four or five years. And so my, my experience of the way I've used it has evolved quite a lot. I start off being very enthusiastic and trying to use it for everything. I found that that isn't really a good idea, so it works well for some things for me, not others. And I just want to explain.

So yes, this is what I find it useful for - sorry the text is a bit small - breaking the ice with new groups. So I do lots of stuff for our incoming undergraduates, or people who've just arrived in year one. It's a great way to get a response in a lecture in a big cohort group to get them to interact. I find it very good for UCAS visit days as well where you might have 20 or 30 or 40 people who you've never seen before and just as a way to allow them to, you know, to interact and get something out of them. It's quite nice to do that. Those groups are very reluctant typically to ask questions and betray some lack of knowledge in front of all the other strangers. So it's a good way to do that.

I find it very useful to check what you saw in that understanding at the start of a topic, and I know I'm slightly repeating what some of the other speakers have said, but particularly, I mean in chemistry, I guess this is true in many departments, but we really have modules that aren't really separate and sandboxed from each other. Our modules very often will build right on top of what they've done before. And so if you're about to start a new module, it's really a good idea to know did they retain anything from the previous one that I need them to know. So that's really good. I like to use Menti in a lecture so we do lots and lots of lectures and lots and lots of content. There's lots of stuff we need to tell our students.

I find it very useful to address and sort of test their understanding of a simple example, and I need to qualify that a little. Partly it assumes I've explained it properly, right? I mean everything's complicated if you don't understand it at all. But also I think it's really crucial to give them time to think about it, right? So I think it's people sometimes use menti as a thing like this, a new thing, a new interesting thing. Do this and it's easy to forget that it needs time to sit. You need to ask the question and give them thinking time. If you're asking them something slightly complicated, that's really key. I think that's as important as getting the wording in the question right is giving them by giving them time to think about it.

I also think it's great for gauging more subjective stuff. So if you're asking the students something like how confident are you in this subject that's that gets around a problem because actually there isn't really a right or wrong answer. And they can just say, I know how I feel about this and they can just do it straight away. So it's good for that as well. There are times when we want to ask students how they feel about an idea or something that's going on.

The other thing I've used it for extensively is for little quick bits of feedback. What I want, we do loads and loads of teaching in chemistry and we have very sort of formal methods of getting student feedback and that's fine. But there are some things that fall outside those feedback methods. So for example, a lot of our small group teaching, we don't collect formal feedback on, but for some of us, some colleagues at the beginning of their contracts or whatever, actually they want to accumulate as much student feedback as they possibly can quite quickly. So you can have a you have a QR code, print out, put it on your office door, do a tutorial, and then just ask the students, please, just snap this on the way out and then tell me how I did. What was it useful for? And you can get really high response rates far better than we get in our automated tools. If you're there with a small group of students and you make your personal pitch to them that this would be really useful for me, please do this. I find that the students respond really well. Well, that's what I found it most useful for.

I'm going to run through a couple of really quick examples. Everyone's seen this one. Right. So new group where have you come from. By the way, I'm going to show you QR codes, please don't use them. Most of them are full of things that I've use and I want the data for other things. This one's empty but other ones. I just screenshotted them quickly. Please don't, don't mess.

And this is a chemistry specific one again. So it's another pin on image. I like pin on image. I think it's great for complex ideas - not that complex but - complex ideas where you want to gauge their understanding. We saw a great one with the nerve cells before. So this there's a thing in chemistry called NMR. There's a thing in NMR called chemical shift. Chemical shift I expect the students to know that that is the right answer Okay, so this is beginning of year two semester one building on stuff they've met before, so maybe they don't need to know it's exactly 7.2, whatever, but. Around about there. And that's great. You can see there are other students who have. Well, as I was saying before, I think when students respond, they respond in any way. They're sending you a message with their response. And our job is to try to interpret that appropriately. The message that these students are saying is, I don't know what you're talking about. The message that this student is sending is 'I reject the premise of the question' that I presume it's like the bottom right corner of the image, right? I guess that's what that means. Yeah, but that's useful to see.

The key thing here is that I am assuming that most of them actually know this, because otherwise the session they're going to plan is misaligned with what the cohort needs. So the nature - if actually all of them got this wrong. I have to refine it really quickly. So, so. So that's what I mean about like a simple concept. You have to be quite confident that they can do okay on it. But otherwise you're in a position where you know that they don't understand it and you have to change your plans. I'll talk a bit more about that.

This is another simple example from a year one lecture. And this is saying would you expect it to be better, worse or no difference. And for context, well, this is in a lecture. It's to break up a lecture. I've spent 20 minutes explaining this simple thing and give me some mathematical models and say, look, thing A is proportional to thing B. The So 5 minutes later I ask the question, so if we increase thing A What happens to thing B. like think that's a simple question, a simple test of their understanding and 90% of them get it right, which again, I think is the right sort of level of positivity to go for because the whole point - I've just done 20 minutes on this, I don't have another 20 minutes to do on this. I need to check that that's okay. So that's the sort of a simple thing I'm asking then to do.

This is a more subjective one where we do a thing in chemistry where - because obviously they're working in the lab a lot and we work very, very hard, as you can imagine, to make the lab an incredibly safe place. But part of that safety has to come from the way the students behave in the lab. And so we have an assessment which we really mean business with this. It's a pass-fail assessment in year one and if the students don't pass it they can't go into year two. This is at the beginning of semester two. We run this now. There are lots of opportunities to retake it, but it's kind of comparable to a driving test. Right? Okay. We expect the students to demonstrate a fundamental level of competence in the lab so they can work safely and not be a danger to themselves or anyone else. So we run this assessment. The students don't like it, as you can imagine. They're very worried about it. We do lots and lots of building up to it and all this sort of thing. But anyway, this lecture is what I do. After they've done the assessment, like a week after they've done the assessments, but before they know the results, that's the context for this. And in this lecture, because they come in, it is the coldest group of students you have ever seen. They look at me like like I wish I could kill you by looking at you. So they're looking at you and obviously they are not really happy because they understand like the jeopardy of this attempt. So I say to them, how do you think you did? And this is what I get. And I talk a lot again about this, reframing it as a driving test and how it's really important. All this stuff can go through this. And we talk about how the assessment went and what were the common errors that people have and try to explain. So you can understand what happened, why certain people didn't pass.

And at the end I told them again, but I'm using this segmentation feature, which I really like because this gives you some insights into what's going on. So the 16 people who didn't think they passed the beginning and so you see that actually after I have explained some of the things, they might think actually he didn't mention any of the things I thought I got wrong - maybe I did OK. Similarly, some of the people who didn't really know, well, I've talked about four or five things that went wrong. And either I've mentioned the thing they worried about or hadn't mentioned things they were worried about. You can see them change their opinions. Crucially for me as well, some of the ones who thought they passed, I managed to plant a seed of doubt in their mind, I'm not quite sure how I did that. And the point isn't really to do anything really hard with these numbers, because immediately after this session we then release the results and we then anyone who didn't pass, we get them in straight in for a kind of retraining session for half the day. The idea is to get them thinking about their own ability to have done this. So it's not just go in I'm grumpy, did I pass, did I fail, go away and vent on whatever social media channel of my choice. It's a way of getting them to re-engage with thinking about it. It's quite a hard sell, but it seems to work OK. But I really like the segmentation tool for that.

So that's what I found to be quite useful for what I found is not so useful for is doing complex concepts. So this is again, I'm not going to do all of the chemistry background for this, but this is back in my very enthusiastic phase. So I thought I'll, I'll test everything in lectures, it'll be great. This is a thing where I'm asking them to make a prediction and the scale question which I really like. All these numbers should be somewhere between zero and 100 And the numbers here tell you the average of what they've got now, the average is useful. But at the same time, it doesn't tell you what the individuals say - you can see individuals here either answered zero or about 50 or about 100. And then this is the numeric average it comes out at. Now, if I show you, then. Now this is after about 30 minutes of explaining from a bunch of key concepts that add up to this. But what I'm really asking them to do is live problem solving in a lecture. These are the answers that they should have. Now, you can see there are lots at each of these places. And when you look at the data, perhaps 40% of them are getting it right. Some of the students though are just voting zero on everything. Right. And again, they're sending me a message and the message is I don't know what you're talking about. That's what it is. And I think this is what I can see. Okay. it landed for some students, but not for others. What I've done here by asking this question, I've neatly divided them into. I've got 200 people. Half of you understand the thing, half of you don't the understand thing. So whatever I talk about for the next 15 minutes. I'm wasting half of your time, right? I mean, that's just how it is. I've put them in a position where I ask the question and they have given me a resounding we don't really understand this and I have to try to respond to that. So I panicked, as you can imagine. But but yeah, basically, I thought about this quite a lot. What's going on? I guess maybe I didn't give them enough time to think about it, but it's a lecture we don't have that much time. I think with a complex concept like this as they go through a lecture. It's not the only place where they get their understanding. They think about it and they're building their understanding. Maybe it's partial, incomplete understanding. And if their understanding is incomplete. I just think maybe a poll is sort of the wrong tool. If they get it right they're maybe too confident in their in their understanding. If they get it wrong they think they don't understand anything. And that's not really true. So so. So, I mean, I've come to the same conclusion. I guess a lot of us come together actually, that sort of thing, when you're really exploring concepts and doing problem solving. I mean, I didn't used to do that in lectures. I thought that Menti might enable me to do it. And I've tried it and it just didn't work that well. I just don't think it's that suited for that, that sort of thing. So I've put it straight back in the workshops and tutorials where it used to live, where it works fine, because I think then they have time to explore it. You can address individual misconceptions with students and talk about them in more and more detail.

So I guess kind of like the line for me here is that you can do a poll and it will tell you it will tell you if they understand a thing or don't understand a thing. Can't tell you why they don't understand it unless you do what you said. A set of like nested things to test individual versions of that misconception. But for my purposes, running like one or two of these things in a lecture, it's easier to just stand back from complex concepts. Okay. And this didn't fit on any of my slides. I think it's worth saying that I've tried doing varying numbers of mentis and I find that they can be distracting. The students begin to disengage from your teaching material and simply anticipate the next poll. Or just play with their phones instead. I once went to a really excellent lecture by an education specialist, but who's also a really talented close up magician. Quite, really, really talented, and had this red laser pointer. That was the trick. So you point to it on the site over here, right? And then you take it to the thing and pick the laser pointer off the screen. It's like little led thing that he'd planted on there. It was absolutely stunning. He did this all the way through, but once he'd done that two or three times, everyone's like, yeah, whatever you're talking about, what's the next trick , do the next trick. And it was it was great. It was a really great tool for engagement, but it really interrupted his his, his flow of what he was trying to convey, I think. And that's sort of what I found in a less skilled and impressive way. by doing that.

So briefly then my conclusions, I think it's great for testing simple questions. I think it's really useful to use different question types, I think that keeps it fresh for us and for the students. I found it great to use it regularly, so like in sessions, I'll try to do it in every session because it overcomes sometimes they're reluctant to engage. Dispels the idea that's burdensome. Students who are nervous about answering become less nervous about it. But I don't think doing it frequently within a session is useful. I tend to do one or two per lecture at most. Choosing the time - someone else was saying before - I think for me I trt to apply it straight after a key concept as long as it's quite a basic concept, but I also find it's kind of like half an hour, 35 minutes in I used to do a lot of teaching in lectures where I'd do a mid lecture break because I think the students they need to put their pens down, turn the brains of for a minute, so I don't do that anymore. But I very often use that space to deploy Menti instead, which has the same a change is as good as a rest sort of sort of feel to it. And I would just say if you do get it wrong and everyone answers something wrong, you expected them to answer, right? Have a backup plan, right? Because again, they've told you they don't understand. You need a way out of that. So I threw together a bunch of stuff, put it on the VLE and had an extra screencast and all this kind of stuff to to make sure I could address that that misconception which I have - which I have revealed. Anyway, that's that's it. So thank you very much for your attention.