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While testing the question with students is the only way to find out if it is effective (in terms of promoting student learning, uncovering misconceptions, and generating student engagement and discussion) you can stack the odds in your favour by considering the following points.
Explain and demonstrate how geologists determine rates of tectonic plate motion from data on seafloor age.
Skills : calculating a rate, reasoning like a geologist, developing competence using geological data, interpreting a representation commonly encountered (but seldom explicitly explained) in textbooks
Concepts : tectonic plates move: the rate of past plate motion at spreading centers (divergent plate boundaries) is known from the age of oceanic crust making up the seafloor.
Promote articulation/discussion, stimulate cognitive processes
Qualitative question, analysis and reasoning, interpret representation, rank variants.
The resulting clicker question had students to look at a map of the earth showing the ages of the seafloors, and students were asked to rank the relative speeds of the plates at various locations.
Beatty et al. I.D.Beatty, W.J. Gerace, W.J. Leonard, and R.J. Dufresne. “Designing effective questions for classroom response system teaching,” American Journal of Physics, 74(1): 31-39 (2006). have discussed tactics to use in designing relatively advanced clicker questions. These are primarily of use to instructors experienced at using clicker questions.
| Question design goals | Tactics |
|---|---|
| Direct attention and raise awareness | - Remove nonessentials
- Compare and contrast - Extend the context - Reuse familiar question situations - Oops-go-back |
| Promote articulation/discussion | - Qualitative questions
- Analysis and reasoning questions - Multiple defensible answers - Require unstated assumptions - Trap unjustified assumptions - Deliberate ambiguity - Trolling for misconceptions |
| Stimulate cognitive processes | - Interpret representations
- Compare and contrast - Extend the context - Identify a set- Rank variants - Reveal a better way - Strategize only - Include extraneous information - Omit necessary information |
| Formative use of response data | - Answer choices reveal likely difficulties
- Use “none of the above” |
| We add: Connect to the real world | - Apply to real world setting
- Pose in terms of real world problem |
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