The lecturer asks students to give a brief response to closed questions or statements. There are always two possible answers, such as correct or incorrect, yes or no, agree or disagree, etc. Students give their answers to each question.
This teaching method allows you to create easy interaction with a large group, and you gain rapid insight into the prior knowledge, characteristics or opinions of students.
- Activity goal
- Activate prior knowledge | Assess | Get to know each other | Recap / Summarize
- When
- In class
- Where
- Offline | Online
- Duration
- < 10 minutes| < 30 minutes
- Group size
- Medium | Large
Step-by-step
Step 1
Come up with a number of clear questions (or statements) that have two possible answers, such as ‘yes/no’, ‘agree/disagree’, ‘correct/incorrect’.
Step 2
Explain how students should indicate their answers to each question. For example: Remain standing for ‘correct’ and sit for ‘incorrect’, put your hand in the air for ‘agree’ and keep it down for ‘disagree’, or stick a post-it in front of your webcam for ‘no’ and remove it for ‘yes’.
Step 3
Ask the questions one by one.
Step 4
Give the students a short amount of time to think about their response, and also think about your own response. Make an inventory of the answers.
Step 5
Once all students have made their choice known, select, where necessary, a number of students to explain or argue their choices. If you use statements, you can then present the statement again to see if the students change their answers. As lecturer, you should also share your answer with the students.
