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Does Displaying the Class Results Affect Student Discussion during Peer Instruction?

Kathryn E. Perez^*, Eric A. Strauss^*, Nicholas Downey^*, Anne Galbraith^*, Robert Jeanne, and Scott Cooper^*

*Department of Biology, University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, La Crosse, WI 54601; and University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706

Monitoring Editor: Mary Pat Wenderoth

Address correspondence to: Kathryn E. Perez (perez.kath{at}uwlax.edu).

The use of personal response systems, or clickers, is increasingly common in college classrooms. Although clickers can increase student engagement and discussion, their benefits also can be overstated. A common practice is to ask the class a question, display the responses, allow the students to discuss the question, and then collect the responses a second time. In an introductory biology course, we asked whether showing students the class responses to a question biased their second response. Some sections of the course displayed a bar graph of the student responses and others served as a control group in which discussion occurred without seeing the most common answer chosen by the class. If students saw the bar graph, they were 30% more likely to switch from a less common to the most common response. This trend was more pronounced in true/false questions (38%) than multiple-choice questions (28%). These results suggest that observing the most common response can bias a student's second vote on a question and may be misinterpreted as an increase in performance due to student discussion alone.