Classroom Response Systems for Implementing Interactive Inquiry in Large Organic Chemistry Classes

摘要

The authors have developed "sequence response applications" for classroom response systems (CRSs) that allow instructors to engage and actively involve students in the learning process, probe for common misconceptions regarding lecture material, and increase interaction between instructors and students. "Guided inquiry" and "discovery-based learning" are based on the premise that the best learning occurs when students are actively engaged in developing hypotheses and arriving at conclusions for themselves, rather than learning in a passive lecture format. In this regard, we use CRSs to actively engage large lectures of 300+ students, where the traditional interaction between students and instructors is commonly limited to the first several rows of the lecture hall. Moreover, series response applications allow a nearly free response format for questioning students, as opposed to the traditional multiple-choice question format commonly used with CRSs. As such, we have observed that students are more engaged and actively involved in answering questions. This paper provides several examples to illustrate how our stepwise technique can be used to demonstrate the depth of insight into student understanding, even of multistep thought processes, afforded through this stepwise analysis.