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School districts that have
experimented with student response
systems, such as Henrico County in
Richmond, Virginia (Henrico County
Schools, 2007), have found that their
teachers develop more confidence in
their ability to monitor student learning.
This confidence in turn can lead teachers to ask more frequent and more
challenging questions.
Students can answer privately—and
sometimes anonymously—with student
responders. This ensures that all
students consistently give teachers feed-back on what they understand. Students
using responders can immediately monitor their own learning. Teachers in
Henrico County found that this created
a sense of transparency, excitement, and
urgency often absent in the classroom.
Because results are recorded automatically on spreadsheets, learning
teams no longer need to tabulate data
manually. Teams can more quickly use
data to spot trends and plan enrichment
or remediation sessions.
Worth the Risks
Perhaps the greatest risk in adopting
student responders is that teachers
might push more meaningful forms of
assessment to the sidelines in favor of
collecting quick and easy data. Without
careful monitoring and professional
development that introduces teachers to
strategies for asking open-ended questions with responders, schools may find
their digital solution takes student questioning in a simplistic direction.
But as a member of a team that once
struggled through reams of data to find
clues that could inform instruction, I
believe the potential rewards of these
digital tools outweigh any risks. As student response systems become standard
features in our classrooms, my
colleagues and I should see our former
burden of collecting, rerecording, and
analyzing data become a smooth
process, freeing us to spend time finding
ways to help every student learn.
Isn’t that what formative assessment
is all about? EL
References
Henrico County Schools. (2007). Study of
Promethean interactive whiteboards in classrooms: Report of findings. Richmond, VA:
Author.
Marzano, R. J. (2003). What works in schools:
Translating research into action. Alexandria,
VA: ASCD.
Parscale, G. (2008). Building a pyramid of
interventions. In The collaborative administrator: Working together as a professional
learning community (pp. 181–196).
Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.
Editor’s note: See Robert J. Marzano’s
column in this issue (“Teaching with Interactive Whiteboards,” p. 80) for a discussion of
the effectiveness of displaying data from
student responders on digital whiteboards.
William M. Ferriter teaches 6th grade
language arts and social studies in
Raleigh, North Carolina, and blogs about
the teaching life at The Tempered Radical
( http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/the
_tempered_radical). He is the coauthor
of Building a Professional Learning
Community at Work: A Guide to the First
Year (Solution Tree, 2009); 919-363-1870;
wferriter@hotmail.com.
A Sampling of Student
Response Systems
; Turning Technologies (www
. turningtechnologies.com/student
responsesystem). These handheld
devices can poll students and
tabulate results even if there is not a
computer or interactive projector in
the classroom.
; ActiVote Student Response
Systems ( www.promethean
world.com/server.php?show=nav
.15999). As students click their
ActiVote responders, all students’
answers are instantly displayed and
analyzed on an interactive digital
whiteboard.
; Smartroom Learning Solutions
( www.smartroom.com/k12.htm).
Smartroom Learning Solutions
student responders enable teachers
and students to ask and answer
multiple-choice, true/false, and
short-answer questions.
