Using Polls to Enhance Student Learning

November 14, 2024 

I was having coffee with a mentor early in my faculty career, eager to gain wisdom about engaging students during class. I brought up the relatively new polling software technology that the university had recently purchased. “Bah,” this established, well-loved teacher said, waving their hands to sweep the idea away. “Entertainment and engagement are two separate things.” I wasn’t a tech-savvy person at the time, and who was I to challenge someone much more experienced than me? A decade of experience later and a little of my own wisdom gained, I have come to appreciate how class polling can enhance student learning in many contexts. For me, that includes small, 30-student upper-level Psychology courses, large 300-student introductory level courses, and (a)synchronous, online courses of various sizes. This is an educational technology that deserves serious consideration (see "Student polling software: where cognitive psychology meets educational practice?" and "On the Use of an Online Polling Platform for Enhancing Student Engagement in an Engineering Module" for evidence supporting classroom polling).

With advances in educational technology, it is now relatively easy to use classroom response systems (aka polling) where students can respond on an app with their mobile device or any device with a web-browser and internet access. Here at JMU, Poll Everywhere or Top Hat are now free to students and faculty. 

You can run polls via a plug-in if you want to embed them directly into your PowerPoint slides or you can run polls from your account online. If the mere thought of “plug-in” gets you feeling down, you’re not alone. Enter the Libraries’ fantastic Learning Innovations and Design team; they’ll get you set up in no time and teach you how to access and use the data. Then, you can focus on the fun stuff—deciding how to use the many kinds of polls (true-false, multiple choice, word clouds, up/down voting, ranking, Likert-scales, competitions, and clickable images) to engage (and even entertain) your students. Below are some purposes for which polls can be used quite effectively.

Information processing: This type of questioning, the most traditional use for polling, helps identify misunderstood or unclear concepts. For example, after explaining the process of neural communication, I might ask students a straightforward multiple-choice or word-cloud question like, “Which part of the neuron receives input from other neurons?” Adding poll questions builds in time for students to process what was just discussed organically. As Lori’s previous Toolbox noted, pausing to allow time for thinking is critical for student learning. Poll responses can quickly show instructors and students where the muddiest points are (if only 40% of students got the right answer, it might be worth revisiting). This immediate feedback also helps students build their blossoming meta-cognitive skills (i.e., awareness of one’s own understanding and learning process).

Attention checks/breaks: Let’s face it, for better or worse, attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Well-paced polling questions can help students wrangle their wandering minds, especially when the purpose and type of questions vary. If you use them in conjunction with other active learning techniques, such as pair-shares, polls can help to recharge our limited attention reservoir. Not all questions need a serious undertone; sometimes, a “fun” question works well for a re-charge. For instance, midway through a lecture on health and wellness, I put up a “this or that” style question where students clicked on the image that best represented themselves: a frazzled lady drinking way too much coffee saying, “I’m stressed” vs. a tidy, smiling lady holding a tray of cookies saying, “Stressed is desserts spelled backwards.” It led to laughter and discussion about their stressors and coping strategies, which happened to be the next topic.

Dispel myths/identify misconceptions: Curiosity is a neurological precursor for deep learning. An especially effective way to pique students’ curiosity is to bust myths. True or False: Children reach motor milestones at roughly the same time worldwide. Agree or Disagree: People have free will. This or That: Knowledge is power vs. Ignorance is bliss (regarding getting genetic testing for a fatal disease). Once students have answered and been given an opportunity to defend their poll responses with peers, we can introduce new information, and then reintroduce the exact same common misconception, controversial topic, preference question, or practice problem. Students can experience in real time how novel information might be used to update their thinking and gain practice encountering differing perspectives. This technique, called Peer Instruction, was developed by Harvard physicist Eric Mazur. If you’re curious—children’s motor milestone achievements vary wildly depending on culture, it depends on how you define free will, and knowledge is power (but only if you are a knowledge seeker to begin with).

Collect anonymous data: It’s one thing to tell students about the results of a study. It’s another to let the results unfold live. For instance, I teach students about common threats to health in young adulthood. I could display the stats from the CDC showing that half of the nation’s new cases of STIs are from youth ages 15-24 years. Interesting, sure. But what if I used the anonymous question feature to ask students (after first establishing community norms and safe boundaries for taboo or difficult topics) how many of them know of a friend who has ever had unprotected sex, what percentage of college students do they think know all the details about their partners’ sexual health before becoming intimate, and how many intimate partners do they think the average 20-year-old has had in the past year? Their own data, displayed in real time, ready for their own inferences to be drawn and compared to nationally and internationally representative norms, are likely a far more impactful experience than simply being told the stats.

These are just a few of many creative uses of class response systems. It’s useful to consider different ideas for how they will work best in your context. For example, I make polls a consistent but low-stakes part of the course as it reduces students’ stress and my administrative overhead with my large class size. Students earn full credit for the day if they answer all or all but one of the questions (correctness is not considered). If something goes wrong with the tech, they can turn in their responses on paper at the end of class (in a class of 300, I usually get between 3-5 paper responses). Allow wiggle room; perhaps students can earn full participation over the course by reaching a threshold (75% of the available points); this practice allows for illness or other absences without instructors having to think up a way for students to “make up” polls. What about cheating? Some response systems have a location setting so that it is clear students were physically in class when answering polls. You can also ask questions like “what color shirt am I wearing today” or only show the question being asked on your projected screen and not on student devices to ensure students are physically present.

Students like using polls, they are relatively easy to use, polls encourage attendance, and they can be beneficial to learning, especially when used to promote peer-to-peer discussion. Anonymous features provide more access and circumvent problems that plague traditional show-of-hand methods, such as when students respond based on who else is raising their hand rather than based on their true beliefs. Polls can open pathways for communication from underserved students who may be more likely than other students to feel intimidated in classroom conversations, or be advantageous for students with certain disabilities. What doors will you open as your polls come in?