Case study: Using Mentimeter open-ended questions and MCQs to check understanding of an academic paper

Department of Psychology
Sally Quinn

Sally Quinn describes how she uses Mentimeter to help prepare students for assessment by supporting and checking understanding of key papers. This helps her to uncover and deal with common misconceptions which would, otherwise, have a major impact on student outcomes.

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Using open-ended and MCQs to check understanding of academic paper (Panopto viewer) (2 min 28 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So another way in which I use Menti to check understanding is particularly when students have to understand a particular academic paper. Now for our assessments that involve practical report writing, there's usually a key paper which their practical builds on. If they don't understand that key paper it can really kind of put them on the back foot when they begin to write up their assessment. So I use Menti just to check that and to kind of help students get on track to make sure that they are starting from the best position possible to be able to do their assessment. So you can see on the screen here that for this particular workshop, that's related to a practical report assessment I ask them prompting questions about their understanding of the design of the study. So the types of variables and the levels of those. I ask them about the design of the study. So do they understand, you know, how it's kind of set up? And then I ask them about the results. So we are testing something so if the results go one way what does that mean? If they go another way what does that mean? And again, that's really important because it not only helps them to understand that paper, but it also helps them to understand how the results are linked to the behaviour that you're testing. So this can be really useful early on so that you can just make sure students are really clear about the key paper that they need to use in their assessment and that they are starting from a good position and you're making sure that their understanding is solid. So in this example, I've shown you here, just a few weeks ago I did this session. One of the questions showed that massively most of them were misunderstanding one element of the results. So I was able to spend about 10 minutes explaining why it would suggest a certain type of behaviour if the results went in a particular way. And if I hadn't have done this question, a majority of those students would have gone away totally misunderstanding the kind of results and how, you know, if they'd gone either way, what it kind of indicates. So I think that's a really useful way in which I've used Menti to try and make sure that students are kind of all starting from the same kind of place before they go off and write their assessment.