Enhancing the Student - Instructor Interaction Frequency

535 T he number of students attending universities has exponentially increased over the past several decades. In response, departments have systematically converted many introductory service courses from small to large lecture settings. In this environment, a teacher may be instructing hundreds of students at a time, which diminishes his or her ability to provide personalized attention to every student. Worse still, basic teaching activities, such as grading homework and administering in-class quizzes, are usually too difficult to implement on such a large scale. Without reinforcement provided through daily practice from quizzes and homework, students often fail to develop a comprehensive understanding of the material. This lack of knowledge may remain undiscovered until after the first exam. Poor student performance may leave them demoralized, sometimes enough to drop the course. If the entire class does poorly on the exam, both the students and teacher rightly question the value of such an educational environment. A stopgap measure introduced by many departments was to create multiple drill or recitation sessions as a supplement to the large lecture classes. Although a smaller class size can be beneficial, this environment is typically designed for the transfer of knowledge instead of interactive personalized attention. Other innovative strategies for solving the large-lecture dilemma have been developed; however, they have not yet been commonly adopted by universities.l–4 One strategy uses student-issued flashcards to engage them in question-and-answer sessions during the regular class period.1 By asking multiplechoice questions and visually tallying the handheld flashcard answers, the teacher determines the knowledge level of the class while the students get feedback about the accuracy of their comprehension. An electronic version of the flashcards, called Classtalk, was introduced about 15 years ago.3,5,6 Classtalk requires hardwiring each desk with a calculator and tracks each student response using a central computer system. A major advantage of Classtalk over the manual flashcards is that the responses can be graded, thus mandating student participation. Other innovative approaches utilize the Internet to enhance the educational process. One such method, Just-In-Time Teaching (JITT), requires students to answer pre-class questions, which the teacher uses to appropriately plan the upcoming lecture, allowing the students to have some limited control over the pace of the course.4 In this article, we describe a teaching technology that is an all-digital, cost-effective solution to the problems described above. Generally, this technology provides a vehicle for mandatory, personalized student Enhancing the Student-Instructor Interaction Frequency