Engaging Your Students, Flipped Lecturing and Personal Response Systems

Personal response systems using hardware such as 'clickers' have been around for some time, however their use is often restricted to multiple choice questions and they are therefore used as a summative assessment tool for the individual student. More recent (and completely free to use!) innovations such as 'Socrative' have removed the need for specialist hardware, instead utilising web-based technology and devices common to students, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. While improving the potential for use in larger classrooms, this also creates the opportunity to pose more engaging open-response questions to students, who can 'text in' their thoughts on questions posed in class. The ‘Flipped-Lecture’ paradigm requires students to do their content-learning in their own time, in advance of the ‘lecture’. Armed with their learning, students can then participate in interactive tasks and benefit from personal contact with a lecturer in class, as opposed to the traditional passive-listening lecture activity. This is an ideal opportunity to use Socrative and allow students to practice their critical thinking skills with formative feedback. I will demonstrate the use of Socrative within an undergraduate psychology curriculum which aimed to encourage interactive engagement with course content using real-time student responses and lecturer feedback.
N.B. If you’d like to see Socrative in action during this session, you can download the app to your smartphone/tablet by downloading the “Socrative Student” app from your app store.