Student Engagement Via Mobile Device Response Systems in a Large Lecture Soil Science Course: A Case Study.

Large lecture courses provide unique challenges to effective teaching in higher education, particularly in regard to student engagement. In large, impersonal lectures students may become disengaged, making it more likely they might get distracted by cell phones, computers, newspapers, or nearby students. Thus, it is important that instructors utilize a variety of means to keep students engaged to ensure the most effective learning environment possible. A well-established technology available to teachers to promote student engagement is student response systems. For many years these entailed “clicker” based systems that required the purchase of hardware for the students. These systems allowed for live results from multiple choice questions to be used as a teaching tool in the classroom. With the emergence of smartphones, laptops, and robust WiFi systems, app and web-app based student response systems have become increasingly popular (e.g. TopHat, Poll Everywhere, etc.). Advantages of these new systems include more diverse question types that utilize the capabilities of mobile devices, friendlier user interfaces, and the utilization of hardware the students already own. A case study will be presented that summarizes the student response systems currently available, lists the criteria used in choosing a student response system in the introductory soil science course at Kansas State University, and evaluates the implementation of the chosen system (TopHat) via student survey data.