One of the fundamental drawbacks of teaching large classes is the reduced opportunity for
discussion and interaction with students (Hodson et al., 2002; Nicol & Boyle, 2003). This is a
result of several interrelated issues including: students being afraid to speak up in front of so
many people, making sure everybody can hear the discussion, and keeping attention up and noise (chatter) levels down. These issues are familiar to NUS lecturers and periodically, ideas on how to overcome them are proposed (Yong, 2005; Ng, 2006). One potential resolution is the use of an electronic classroom response system, known as the Classroom Performance System (CPS), that employs wireless handsets provided to individual students or small groups so that they can respond instantaneously to questions posed by the lecturer (Nicol & Boyle, 2003; Beatty et al., 2006). Results are provided in graph format using software that is compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint (http://www.cit.nus.edu.sg/response/). The advantages of this system include high student participation, anonymity (even shy students can have their ‘say’) and immediate feedback for both lecturer and student (when the results and correct answers are displayed).

I regularly use quizzes, activities and games (QAG) in small group teaching (Todd, 2005; Todd, 2007) but to date, have been unable to conduct any sort of competition with large classes in a lecture theatre. Conducting QAG in large classes is hampered by problems such as difficulty in organising workable teams, discerning which student responds first (e.g. when conducting ‘first correct answer’ type of quizzes), and ensuring all members of a team are involved. I hoped CPS would help me overcome these issues as it automatically records answers and all students should have an opportunity to participate. Projected educational outcomes include increased interaction, higher levels of participation, topic revision and greater general interest in the lecture by making it more fun.

The participating class was LSM1103 “Biodiversity”, a large (315 students) first-year
introductory module. As the assigned lecture theatre had three seating sections where the two side blocks comprised approximately the same number of seats as the centre block, I created two large teams: the centre block (team name ‘The middle way’) versus the two side blocks (team name ‘On the side’). The 100 CPS handsets provided by the NUS Centre for Instructional Technology (CIT) were equally divided between the two teams so that the units were shared among (more or less) groups of three students. The technology seemed to appeal to students and they quickly learnt how to use the handsets.

The CPS software was reasonably easy to operate, with the software’s onscreen buttons appearing below the PowerPoint slides. The greatest problem I faced using the CPS to conduct team-based quizzes was that it will not allow the creation of teams! When I posed a question with three possible correct answers (e.g. A, B or C), there was no way to display the number (or percentage) of correct answers each team gave. As each handset unit was numbered, I was expecting to be able to instruct the programme that units 1 to 50 would be team X and 51 to 100 would be team Y. However, the CPS is designed to facilitate feedback from the whole class, not subdivisions, and therefore it will only display a results graph for the entire class. I had to ‘shoehorn’ the system to my needs by explaining to the students that for the same question, one team was to answer A, B or C, whereas the other had to answer D, E or F. Figures 1 and 2 show two examples of the slides.

Figure 1. Example of the slide with questions for team
‘The middle way’

Figure 2. Example of the slide with questions for team
‘On the side’

This approach worked, but was far from ideal as both the students and myself had to concentrate on the scoring system. During the next lecture, I simplified the structure to ‘true or false’ so that for team ‘The middle way’, true was ‘A’ and false was ‘B’, whereas for team ‘On the side’, true was ‘C’ and false was ‘D’. As this was a more effective arrangement, I used it for the final two lectures. Of course, this arrangement still gave one team the opportunity to sabotage the other. For instance, based on the ‘true or false’ example (and imagine ‘true’ was the correct answer), members of team ‘On the side’ could press ‘B’ and therefore boost the number of incorrect responses registered for team ‘The middle way’. Although such manipulation was generally easy to detect (i.e. there were no longer 50 responses from each
team), there was nothing that could be done to fix the problem except to ask the students to play fair. Fortunately, my class only identified (and exploited) this loophole in the fourth and last lecture, to much hilarity!

There were two steps to getting the results up on screen. The first was to ensure that the entire class had entered their answers, and I found a 5-second countdown helped speed things up. As each unit is numbered, it is possible to identify those who have yet to respond and encourage them with a comment like “come on number 18, you can do it!” After the students have done their part, the system takes between 5–10 seconds to register and present the results of all 100 units, which can feel slow when the quiz is meant to be rapid fire. The time can be filled by a routine remark such as: “So, what was the right answer?”—wait for students to shout out their responses—“Yes, that’s right, now let’s see which team has the most correct responses”, by which time the graph should have appeared.

Although students responded well to seeing their team win a point, true team spirit was difficult to cultivate. This is perhaps unsurprising with more than 150 members to a team and the competition running over just four lectures. Being such a large class, many students had to leave relatively early for other lectures. Whereas some might have felt compelled to stay if my lecture ran slightly over time, I found out during the first quiz that they had no qualms leaving during QAG, and I had to make sure there was enough time to finish in subsequent classes. Due to the large class size, it was also hard to ensure all students had put their notes away before we started, but the fact that they had to respond to the questions quickly resolved this particular obstacle.

Overall, the majority of students seemed to appreciate the quizzes as a break from my regular lecturing. Apart from the issues raised earlier, there were no major hiccups and all the handsets were returned without having to have them signed in and out. It is worth noting that although it would have been ideal if each student had a unit to ensure total participation, it would be logistically challenging to distribute and collect them. Each team won two quizzes, an equanimous finish, and after the last quiz I used the CPS to ask the following three feedback questions:

Figure 3. Feedback questions on QAG

The responses to these questions appear encouraging in that the quizzes were not too easy
and helped most students remember information from the lectures. This latter point is supported by comments in the official Student Feedback Report, such as QAG was “…a good method of helping students to remember the content of the current lecture as well as recap the content from previous lectures.” and “I think the idea of having quizzes is great, it makes me recall facts I would have otherwise forgotten...makes learning fun, which is always good.” I could have asked whether the QAG helped students understand the subject, but past experience (Todd, 2005; Todd, 2007) suggests that such quizzes are best used as revision tools, and that one should not expect too much in terms of higher learning. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to interview individual students to determine why only 56.5% replied “yes” to “Did you enjoy the quizzes?”

In conclusion, although I think the CPS has a future role to play in large class QAG, I would be
reluctant to use it again until it is easier to present the results for individual teams.

References
Beatty, I.D.; Gerace, W.J.; Leonard, W.J. & Dufresne, R.J. (2006). Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching. American Journal of Physics Vol. 74, pp. 31–39.

Hodson, P., Saunders, D. & Stubbs, G. (2002). Computerassisted assessment: Staff viewpoints on its introduction within a new university. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol. 39, pp.145–152.

Ng, K.L. (2006). Improving interactive teaching in large classes. Experiments in Pedagogy: Selected papers from PDP-T Programme, Centre for Development of Teaching & Learning, National University of Singapore Vol. 1, pp. 19–24.

Nicol, D.J. & Boyle, J.T. (2003). Peer instruction versus classwide discussion in large classes: A comparison of two interaction methods in the wired classroom. Studies in Higher Education Vol. 28, pp. 457–473.

Todd, P.A. (2005). Conf lict in the classroom: Motivating students via team competition. Proceedings of the International Conference for Education, Vol. 1, pp. 422–427.

Todd, P.A. (2007). Using quizzes, activities and games (QAG) to engage and motivate biology students. Experiments in Pedagogy: Selected papers from PDP-T Programme Volume 2, Centre for Development of Teaching & Learning, National University of Singapore, pp. 61–69.

Yong, L. (2005). Demonstrations as effective teaching aides in large classes. Ideas on Teaching, Vol. 3, pp. 62–63.