Class participation: Using technology to enhance efficiency and fairness

• Main Authors: GAN, Benjamin, OUH, Eng Lieh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2023
• Subjects: Class participation; active learning pedagogy; technology enhanced participation; fair student participation; teacherinfluence.; Software Engineering; Technology and Innovation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8702; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9705/viewcontent/Class_Participation_Using_Technology_to_Enhance_Efficiency_and_Fairness.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Class participation can be considered as contribution to discussion, attendance, presentations, unsolicited responses, questions, comments, etc. What counts may vary across individual teachers. The more students participate, the less memorization they do, and the more they engage in higher levels of thinking, including interpretation, analysis, and synthesis. However, only a handful of students in many classrooms participate regularly, a phenomenon dubbed as "consolidation of responsibility". This study provides a literature review of inclass participation, as well as pedagogies and technologies that enhance participation. Pedagogies such as active learning, group learning, project-based learning and flipped classroom. Technologies to automate attendance taking, raising hand as well as for online learning to detect participation, analyze participation, and provide participation feedback.We introduce SKOR, a class participation system that automates fair student participation without wasting class time. We conducted an experiment to know if SKOR kept student updated on their participation points and if it is more efficient and fairer at collecting participation. Our finding is that using SKOR did not have any significant difference on student perception of class participation. However, teacher influences the perception more. Students like shared learning, fairness, and more participation options. They dislike limited opportunity, apprehension and assessing quantitative participation over qualitative participation. These are aligned with our literature review. We hope our review and experiment provide teachers with ideas to improve participation in their classroom.