Voting cards. A low-tech concept test tool, enhancing student engagement and participation. (Post 1/3)

Voting cards are a tool that I learned about from Al Trujillo at the workshop “teaching oceanography” in San Francisco in 2013. Basically, voting cards are a low-tech clicker version: A sheet of paper is divided into four quarters, each quarter in a different color and marked with big letters A, B, C and D (pdf here). The sheet is folded such that only one quarter is visible at a time.

A question is posed and four answers are suggested. The students are now asked to vote by holding up the folded sheet close to their chest so that the instructor sees which of the answers they chose, whereas their peers don’t.

Voting cards are sheets of paper with four different colors for the four quarters, each marked with a big A, B, C or D.

This method is great because it forces each individual student to decide on an answer instead of just trying to be as invisible as possible and hope that the instructor will not address them individually. Considering different possible answers and deciding on which one seems most plausible is important step in the learning process. Even if a student chose a wrong answer, remembering the correct answer will be easier if they learn it in the context of having made a commitment to one answer which then turns out wrong, rather than having not considered the different options in enough detail to decide on one. “I thought A made sense because of X. But then we discussed it and it turns out that because of Y and Z, C is the correct answer” is so much more memorable than “I didn’t care and it turned out it was D”. Since the answers are only visible to the instructor and not to the other students, the barrier of voting is a lot lower because potentially embarrassing situations are being avoided. It is, however, also much harder to just observe the peers’ votes and then follow the majority vote.

In addition to helping students learn, this method is also beneficial to the instructor. The instructor sees the distribution of answers with one glance and rather than guessing how many students actually understand what I was talking about, I can now make an informed choice of the next step. Should I have students discuss with their neighbor to find an agreement and then ask the class to vote again? Elaborate more on the concept before asking students to discuss among themselves? Ask individual students to explain why they chose the answer they chose? Knowing how much students understood is very helpful in choosing the right method moving forward with your teaching. And even without staring directly at specific students, it is easy to observe from the corner of the eye whether students have trouble deciding for an answer or whether they make a quick decision and stick to it.

I have been using this method in this year’s GEOF130 lecture, and in a recent Continue. Stop. Start. feedback that I asked my students to fill in, every single student (who handed back the form, but that’s a topic for a different post) mentioned how the “A, B, C, D questions” or “quizzes” (which I both interpret as meaning the voting cards) help them learn and that I should definitely continue using them.

This post is number 1 of 3 on the topic of voting cards. Post no 2 will give examples of different types questions/answers that work well with this methods (for example always having only one correct answer might not be the most efficient strategy to foster discussions), and how to use them to maximize benefit for your teaching. Post no 3 will focus on introducing voting cards as a new method with least resistance by focussing on benefits to student learning and reassuring them on how the instructor will handle the information gained from seeing everybody vote.