Case study: Using segmentation to track changes in learning activities

Department of Psychology
Sally Quinn

Sally Quinn describes how she uses 'segmentation' to show changes in responses before and after an activity. Segmentation allows the results of an MCQ question to be shown according to the way that participants responded to a previous question to reveal patterns of responses and to highlight whether those who answered question one in a particular way are more likely to make particular selections for question two. By repeating the same question, Sally is able to uncover ways in which students might have 'changed their minds' about particular questions and to use this to inform her teaching and provide feedback.

Watch their presentation:

Using segmentation to track changes in learning activities (Panopto viewer) (2 min 03 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

So one way I use Menti is to use the segmentation function on there. And this allows you to separate a MCQ based on students' responses to a previous MCQ. So the example I have on the screen now is that I do a series of lectures that talk about how the presence of other people can affect our behaviours. So I tell them the story about an Olympian who, because of illness, was not allowed to take part in the heats. So he had to run against the clock. So in other words, he was running solo rather than running with other people. So how did that affect his performance? So I ask them this question from the outset before we talk about any of the theories or the models on this to see whether they thought that was a fair option. So they answer yes or no, and then I just leave it, talk about the theories and the models that explain how, you know, the presence of others affects our behaviours. And then at the end of that, I'll ask them the same question, and I'll set Menti to kind of separate it in terms of how they answered it the first time around. And that kind of allows you to see how students may have changed their mind because of the content that you've just taught them. And this is really useful, particularly for elements where there's no right or wrong answer. So particularly in psychology, we might have lots of different theories that have - are trying to explain a behaviour, but they have weaknesses with them and different types of weaknesses. So being able to have this type of slide where you can see that some people have stayed the same, some people have switched in different directions. It can allow you to talk about why some people might have stayed the same, why some people have switched in one way and why the others have switched the other way around. So this is really interesting because it can help you to kind of summarise what you've talked about off the back of how students kind of thinking and learning has changed.