Case study: Using Mentimeter questions to elicit student-generated examples

Department of Psychology
Sally Quinn

Sally Quinn describes how she uses a range of question types and incorporates visuals to stimulate thinking and elicit ideas and examples to draw upon within teaching sessions. This helps her to personalise, contextualise and exemplify key aspects of the subject matter, making complex points more relatable and easier to understand.

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Using Mentimeter questions to elicit student-generated examples (Panopto viewer) (3 min 59 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So another way Menti is really useful is to get information from students that you can use as examples to refer to throughout your teaching. And this is really useful because it makes sure that the examples that you use are relevant to their kind of experiences. So an example on the screen now is a sliding scale. And in my sessions where I talk about personality and we talk very much about different models and different ways of measuring that. So these examples on the screen now are just examples of items that are used to measure personality. So I get them to do this at the beginning of the lecture and then we talk about different models and different ways in which these kinds of items can be used to tap into personality. Now I will often go back to these questions or these items on the scale just to kind of explain to them how the kind of grouping of these types of items might change depending on the model and why they have changed. So that's quite useful for them to see how they responded to those questions and how the their own responses to that question feeds into the different models of personality.

Another way of kind of making them aware of how their own kind of responses to things link to the personality models or measurements that I teach them about is to give them something like an image or some kind of question from the beginning of the lecture and ask them to just respond to it in a certain way. So as an example, here I show them an image where it's apparently supposed to tell us something about people's personality in terms of their interpretation of what's going on in the picture. We then follow up with why this perhaps isn't such a great measure of people's personality, but it's a kind of fun thing to start off with. You can see on the screen that actually, perhaps our students are a little bit dark because there's a lot of negative stuff going on here, but it's a good way to kind of get them thinking about how would I respond to this picture? And actually, is it a good measure of my personality or not?

Another way in which I do it to get students more involved and thinking about the paradigms and the theories we've talked about is to again getting them to do something that kind of relates to how certain studies that we talked about use a particular paradigm. So in one set of lectures I do, it's about social groups and how we treat people from the same group as us compared to the external group. And one paradigm is is where participants are given a matrix, such as the one on the screen now. And you have to choose a combination of these numbers to give your in-group member a certain set of points and then you get the outgroup member the matching points with that. So students are in two groups in the lecture theatre, and I get them to kind of have a think about which combination they would choose. I then use the segmentation feature on Menti, so I'll ask them first on one slide to just to allocate which team they're in, so yellow or green. And then I'll give them this slide here to kind of report what pairing of those options that they selected. And the reason I do this is because the different pairings can show different strategies for kind of in-group and outgroup thinking. So I can kind of choose, you know, some of these options and go - OK - So those people who chose seven and one, you're using this particular strategy. Those who chose 13 and 13, you're using a slightly different strategy and you can really kind of relate it back to their own experiences.

So that's kind of how I use Menti just to kind of get students involved in kind of, you know, producing their own examples that you can then use to help and understand different aspects of your teaching.