Case study: Using Mentimeter to arouse and sustain interest in Psychology lectures

Department of Psychology
Alex Reid

Alex Reid highlights some of the ways in which he uses Mentimeter within his Psychology lectures to engage students with the lecture experience and contents. Firstly he describes some of the quick questions he utilises at the beginning of lectures to highlight key concepts and surprise or interest his students before moving into the lecture contents. He then outlines how he uses knowledge-checking questions to elicit levels of understanding amongst his students, and to highlight knowledge gaps, before highlighting how he uses Mentimeter in more involved Psychology-specific ways to explore and illustrate psychological constructs and metrics by gathering live data from his students related to specific psychological tests and phenomena.

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Using Mentimeter to arouse and sustain interest in Psychology lectures (Panopto viewer) (9 mins 18 secs, UoY log-in required)

Transcript

Hi, I'm Alex Reid from the Department of Psychology, and I'm here to tell you today about how I use Menti in a couple of different ways. It's interactive polling software. It's really, really useful and I've got a couple of approaches here that I think will hopefully help you out. One is a perhaps bit more general and I hope will apply to lots of different disciplines, and this is asking students warm up questions or just checking their knowledge throughout. I've also got two more psychology specific examples which will hopefully get your sort of creative juices flowing regarding how you can use it in your discipline.

The first examples I'm going to be using for my teaching block on infancy, where I teach about infant behaviour, these are the warm up questions that I just mentioned. This just goes to show you you don't need to necessarily use Menti in a fancy way. You can use it strategically to engage students. Here, before I even taught students anything, I ask them questions related to the subject, but maybe just get them thinking about the area. So the brain is the last organ to start developing in the prenatal period. True or false? Brain development is influenced by environmental factors in the prenatal period. True or false? Most of the brain's neurones are present at birth. True or false? That's actually a picture of me, if you're interested. And between weeks two and eight of gestation, the embryo increases in size by the numbers I've got here on the right. So how does this look in Mentimeter? Here we've got the questions. Typically multiple choice for these. And here we've got, for example, the brain is the last organ to start developing the prenatal period. True or false? You've got a question here that students, maybe one over one third of them have actually got wrong. And we got the false answer here flagged up in the responses. Now, typically when I ask this question, I hide people's answers as they come in, you can turn the option on and off, and that's to stop people's responses getting influenced by each other. So it's a genuine surprise when I unveil the answers and what they responded. In this particular case, although most have got it correct, enough of them got it wrong. You know, it's an interesting question to ask. Here's something less equivocal. Brain development is influenced by things in the womb that occur before you are born. And here's something that's a lot more up for debate. Most of your brain's neurones are present at birth. Actually, this is false. And you are actually born with most of your brain cells. This is a really good example of surprising people with information and piquing their interest before you actually engage in the subject.

Here's a similar example. You've got a normal distribution here around people's estimation of the mass increase during the gestational period. And here we can see the majority of the class think it's a 1,000% increase between weeks two and eight of gestation. But actually it's a million. So, again, this is a bit of knowledge, surprise. And this helps highlight just how important this stage of human development is. And again, I think it's a really good or I hope, useful example of warming up people before they get stuck into learning about topics specifically. Another example here is just knowledge checking. So here I've got an example pin the label on the brain cell. Now in psychology we have lots of students that come from different disciplines and some they've studied psychology or biology before and others may not. And this is a first year module. So what I do is I just ask people to go through this type of question where you basically pin it on an image and I'll show you what that looks like, in Menti momentarily and basically ask people to start labelling this brain cell. And this allows people who already know which parts of brain cells are which, to contribute to an overall sort of lesson for the class, and it allows people too who don't maybe know what's going on to spot gaps in their knowledge, so everyone can contribute. So what does this look like in Menti? Here we have some responses and here we can see that most students got this right. Where's the nucleus? Easy peasy. This is a pin on the image question and 146 of the class pinned it correctly in the right spot. As we go through the questions, there's varying responses. Here, for example, we ask where the axon is. Although 96 of the students got it correct, we got some mislabelling here. So clearly, this is perhaps a gap in people's knowledge. And this allows this particular question to highlight that through checking people's knowledge as you go through your class.

Onto some more psychology specific examples of how you can use menti. There's this particular question where I basically have an open question that people can submit answers to on screen. This is part of something called Guilford's Alternative Uses Task. This is to measure creativity, which is a very hard thing to define and measure. And this is one way that people have had to go doing that. And essentially, you give people an object or item. How many uses can you think of X? For example, it could be a plank or it could be a spoon or it could be a mug. And in this particular case, I asked people how many uses they can think of for a brick. Now, here we can see some of the responses. Quite a surprising amount of violence it always gets to me every year. I typically make a little joke about that but I can actually use it to present the menti interface that people actually use in psychology. And I can pick out responses that students have made in order to illustrate ways this measure could be scored. For example, in terms of originality. So it might be very rare that some people say you can use it as a pet brick, but people actually say quite commonly that you can use it for violence and that is one way this can be scored. Alternatively, elaboration. So technically to build a house is four words versus just the word house here, which is one word, and elaboration might be another way that you can score this creativity metric. This is a good way of getting students involved in understanding metrics to do with psychology by actually contributing and paying attention to data that they are producing from it. I would say if you are using this type of question, just be aware that anyone can write on the screen. If you're worried about people writing stuff on the screen, even with a swear word filter. Feel free to blank the screen, but be aware that this can still be replicated on the recording of the lecture later. I myself, I've just kind of accepted that it doesn't happen very often. Sometimes people write silly things, but ultimately that's on the students if they're larking about, frankly, and you can still make a joke about it and move on or just deal with it.

Now, the last example I want to talk about is, again, another measure that people use in psychology that I've incorporated into a menti question. And this particular case is a word cloud. And this particular word cloud is going to allow us to measure something called the availability heuristic, which is something that can affect human decision making or basically demonstrate that human decision making is influenced by how easily something comes to mind. Now, this particular question 'in one minute, I want the student to tell me as many words as they can, beginning with K' and in a word cloud the more frequent a word is submitted, the bigger it gets, basically. And it's perfect for this kind of task. Then I asked them in one minute to tell me as many words as they can with the third letter being 'k'. So what does this look like in Menti? So here's what the word cloud looks like in Menti. Here we see the word cloud option selected and students are allowed to submit multiple times, although they can only make one entry at a time. This allows us to build up a word cloud. So you can see 'kill' is very frequent, 'knife'. Very frequent. And then there are things that are a lot more infrequent, like knick. But generally this is quite a large word cloud as there's a fairly prominent degree of variety here. Then we got the second question, and now you see that the variety of responses is a lot more diminished. And what's interesting about this in terms of teaching students this particular aspect of their psychology is actually there's a lot more words in the English language that have the third letter being K than the first letter being K. Yet they produced wordclouds that would indicate that it's the opposite. And the rationale here is for this particular measure that the words beginning with K also come to mind a lot more easily than words with third letter K, thus illustrating the availability heuristic.

So that wraps up my short presentation. I do use Menti in lots of other ways and I'm hoping this gives you some food for thought regarding how you can use it. And I would say my experience of this is that students really do like interactive components. It's a very good way of also keeping people on their toes and avoiding people dropping... going off into a general stupor over the course of like a 90 minute to two hour session. I would just be aware for accessibility purposes, not everyone may have access to Menti. Some people, for example, might be visually impaired. I typically explain very clearly and describe very clearly what's going on in the slides and ask people to imagine, for example, the pin the tail on the brain cell, or pin the item on the brain cell I ask people to imagine the scenario just to make them feel included at the very least, if you're going to go down that route. I would encourage you to be adaptive. There are some examples from psychology, I think very easily lend themselves to Menti and that might be slightly harder work in different disciplines, but I'm absolutely sure that there are things that that you can use in various creative ways to get students on board and get them involved in an interactive way with your classes. I would recommend if you do this, you try and tie Menti to a specific point, I think Menti really comes into its own when you're using it to illustrate a single thing or single point rather than multiple points and overload people. And last of all, have fun with it. I think students really pick up when you are having a good time or getting creative with it or surprising them with it in a fun, gentle way. And again, I think this is a real strength of menti that I hope people use in the classroom. Thank you.