Centre for Learning and Professional Development

Centre for Learning and
Professional Development
North Terrace Campus
Level 2, Schulz Building West
THE UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE
SA 5005
AUSTRALIA
Email

Telephone: +61 8 8303 5771
Facsimile: +61 8 8303 3553

And the winning email question is... (or how I got students to ask the questions they needed to ask)

Dr Derek Abbott
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

"The key point is that I helped the students to relax and feel as though they could ask anything"

Description

For some years I had been trying to use email as a method of feedback from students. This strategy was a success in that it created a system of mandatory weekly email reports from my final year project students. The key element here was that I got the students to not only write on their weekly progress, but also their goals for the following week. This continues to be an excellent tool for keeping final year project students focussed and accountable.

One notable failure was my idea of asking students during lectures to email me questions about anything that was unclear during the class (The response was really low!). The problem was (i) shyness (most students like to ask questions anonymously) and (ii) after the lecture is over, the questions are no longer fresh in the mind of the student.

This all changed in 1998 when I attended courses organised by the ACUE and HERDSA and learned of and adapted a technique used by Prof. Frederick Mosteller (Professor of Statistics at Harvard). He would ask his students at the end of each lecture to write the "muddiest point" in the lecture on a scrap of paper. He would then answer the 2-3 most common questions in the following lecture.

In combining my original email idea with Mosteller's technique I created a surprisingly powerful evaluation strategy that has seen student satisfaction increase markedly in my 2nd, 3rd and 4th year Electronic Engineering Subjects.

Aims

to get immediate feedback from the students on the unclear issues
to rectify misunderstandings quickly
to ensure the requisite information is absorbed prior to introducing new material
to give insight as to how to adjust lecture material

Process

I realised that Prof. Mosteller's technique was the answer to my problem as (i) it's an anonymous system and (ii) it's an immediate process (whilst the mind is still fresh), so I adapted this idea. However, I made a number of important rules:

(i) I replied to every question by emailing the whole class. Students usually had about a week to review the answers as I would answer the questions immediately after the lecture and the lectures were generally weekly. I also posted all the questions and answers on a web page so that students could look at the entire body of question/answer material. This required a considerable investment in time. On the evening of a lecture I would spend between three and five hours responding to questions (depending on class size, which varied between 60min and 180max). My hope is that the 3-5hours is just the "set up investment" and that the same answers can be recycled to some extent so that in future years the job becomes less time-consuming. This hypothesis is yet to be tested!

(ii) I answered all questions clearly & sincerely no matter what. I made it a rule to treat each question seriously and not "talk down" to those questions that appeared rather trivial. For questions that were too complicated to reply by email, I would let the students know that I would reply verbally in the following lecture. It was vital that students felt that no question was too stupid.

(iii) I used humour and simple mental pictures in my replies. I wanted to make the material engaging for the students so that they would be interested in the response and feel capable of understanding it.

(iv) I even replied to quirky comical questions. The inclusion of quirky humour resulted in each class having a number of "in jokes" that we would revisit and all laugh at during lectures ...this created a class "bonding experience." This humour also encouraged students to look at all the questions and answers for the amusing ones. By looking at all the material they developed a picture of the other students' difficulties as well as their own.

(v) I also asked my colleagues to cast an eye over the web page, both to double-check my own explanations and to make sure my humour was appropriate.

Another "twist" is that at the beginning of each lecture I would award a prize for the most "perceptive question." This was defined as the question that stumped me and made me think the most. The prize was the lowest denomination of money that happened to be in my wallet. This could be anything between 5 cents and a $50 dollar note. Thankfully, I never parted with more than $2 at a time. But the element of risk was something that kept the students highly attentive.

This whole process kept me in tune with where the students were at and helped me to improve my lecture format and content. I also found that setting appropriate exam questions became much more straight forward.

Examples

Muddiest Points:-
-----------------

1) Bipolar transistors

OK....I'll go thru' this again.

2) Superposition theorem

OK.....I'll go thru' this again.

3) Electron/hole interaction during conduction

There is a depletion region between the n-channel and the p-substrate.
So holes and electrons are segregated, when the transistor is on.

4) Exactly what is going on when the MOSFET is on.

When the n-MOSFET is on, holes are repelled from the surface and electrons
are attracted to the surface. The "sheet" of electrons at the surface is then
a conducting channel that connects source and drain.

5)Why did you wear a yellow tie with a green suit?

It was actually a gold coloured tie. I wore it to keep you awake ;-)

Evaluation

The method was tried in my 2nd, 3rd and 4th year Electronic Engineering Subjects. My student evaluation of teaching (SET) scores were, prior to this innovation, hovering around a very respectable 70% for the overall sum-up question: "How do you rate this person as a university lecturer?". Subjects adopting this technique are now getting a rating over 85%. The 3rd year subject is particularly significant as it is an electronics "minority" course to Mechanical Engineers, who hate doing this subject outside their normal discipline. This subject normally gets a student evaluation rating of around 67% with only a 55% attendance rate. Post the changes I received an evaluation of over 90% and also had an 87% attendance!

Future developments

My next goal is to make in-class feedback even more immediate and continuous. Dr. Wen Soong, a colleague in my department, and I are jointly developing an electronic display that counts yes/no responses from the students. Yes/no buttons will be wired to every desk in a lecture theatre and the display will be visible at the front. We call this the "electronic class voting system". Similar ideas have been tried in the US with great success. With this system in place I will be able to get on the spot feedback on whether the students understood the material presented and what percentage found it difficult. This will not provide the reflection time that the email technique allows, but it will alert me as to when the lecture is going off track.

Interesting Open Questions Yet to be Tackled

How many students looked at the questions before the following lecture?

What would other evaluations show? Are there improvements in exam marks?

Reference

D. Abbott (1999) 'And the winning email question is...how I got students to ask the questions they needed to ask,' In I. Roberts & M. Kiley (Eds) LearnIT Symposium. ACUE, Adelaide, pp 13-22.

Contact
Derek Abbott can be contacted on

Tel: +61 8 8303 5748, Fax: +61 8 8303 4360
E-mail: dabbott@eleceng.adelaide.edu.au
Adelaide University, Australia 5005

last updated 26 November 2001