Case study: Using Mentimeter to gauge students' feelings and preferences

Department of Education
David O’Reilly

David O'Reilly describes how he uses Mentimeter to support planning across a module, eliciting student preferences, experience, and confidence levels to help him to make choices over content and examples to include in teaching. As well as uses for longer-term planning, he also uses it to gather ongoing feedback support decisions over short-term teaching plans such as how groups should be allocated.

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Using Mentimeter to gauge students' feelings and preferences (Panopto viewer) (2 mins 01 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

I found Mentimeter very useful for gauging students' feelings, their preferences and their confidence levels about things on the module. So with this question, you can see that the students have some trepidation about the module. I can use questions like this to kind of spot things they might be worried about or things they might feel more confident with. Multiple choice questions have the advantage that you restrict the responses, but you get the broad sense of where the group are at on the whole. Obviously, you could do this kind of thing with word clouds, you get a much more nuanced picture from that. So multiple choice, good for getting a main interpretation. With this example, I can see that students are in different places in terms of what they identify most with on the module. So again, this will help me plan in terms of what exact content I include later in the term. It'll help me think a bit more carefully about the examples I gave and who I'm catering for. So I think this is very useful for longer term planning, but it's also useful for shorter term planning. So in the session itself, if I want to seek students' views on whether they prefer to be randomly allocated into groups or whether they would like to choose their own groups, I can use Mentimeter questions like this for that. So I think it's useful for getting quick feedback on a large group of students, where they're at, how they're feeling about something. It's anonymous, of course, but it's shared and it's open to everyone. So everyone in the group can see the results and see how people are feeling generally. It demonstrates to students I think that you care about how they're feeling and that you're giving them a say in certain decisions about how the module is run, which I think is very important. And it's also useful for breaking up the flow of a lecture, taking stock at certain points, and it's a good opportunity for humour as well.