Tag: think-pair-share

The birth of a clicker question

It’s easy to come up with poor clicker questions, ones that merely test who has memorized X, Y, or Z from the previous slide. Or questions where there is no way to figure out the answer: either you’ve got it or you don’t.

Good clicker questions, on the other hand, take some time to create. Sure, you might stumble onto a good one every now and then, and it gets easier as you do it more. But it’s really gratifying when you put in the time, and it works. Here’s my story.

The constellation Orion
The constellation Orion(APOD 2008 October 15)

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Interpreting formulas and graphs

When you pose a question to students about a non-trivial concept, and they get it wrong, it’s not obvious where the error occurred, which step they missed or misunderstood.

Every now and then, though, you find a “diagnostic” question that clearly discriminates between the people who have a certain morsel of knowledge and those who don’t. I found one of these questions in the #astro101 class I’m working on.

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