Student Response Systems (SRS) are popular technology tools designed to streamline course management procedures while providing a variety of methodological tools that serve to facilitate the teaching-learning process. SRS integrate into Power Point, allow in-class student-teacher interaction via anonymous objective or subjective assessment, and provide immediate instructional feedback to an entire class. Feedback includes graphs that indicate percentage of specific question responses, repolling tools, and/or correct answer indicators; any of which are presented at the discretion of the instructor. SRS easily integrates testing results into Learning Management Systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai, thus expediting formative and summative assessment procedures. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two SRS programs, einstruction’s Classroom Performance System (CPS) and Turning Technology’s Turning Point (TP), in two separate sections of a university senior/graduate level Perceptual Motor Development course which included lecture/laboratory components.
Method:
SRS were utilized in the lectures via (1) daily interactive quizzes presented within the context of PowerPoint lectures that evaluated course content knowledge (CK) and (2) application/analysis questions from case studies hypothesizing practical teaching applications from the laboratory. Eighteen students from each lecture served as subjects (CPS versus TP). Each group completed a 30-question standardized PRE/POST course CK test which served as the criterion measure for the study.
Analysis/Results:
ANOVA with repeated measures revealed significant post-test mean (POST-M) increases for both SRS groups: F (1, 34) = 187.68 (p < .001, Effect Size (ES) .85); a significant SRS group main effect F (1, 34) = 4.26 (p < .047, ES .11); and a significant SRS x POST-M interaction F (1, 34) = 19.55 (p < .001, ES .37). ES for the TP PRE-POST treatment was .92; ES for the CPS PRE-POST treatment was .69. Tukey Post-Hoc HSD indicated that TP users significantly outperformed CPS users on the post-test.
Conclusions:
Although both SRS technologies were valuable teaching tools, TP was more effective than CPS. The low N minimizes generalization outside this population; however, student evaluations indicated that TP simplified enrollment procedures and basic user functions, employed more attractive ancillary utilities, functioned more reliably, and integrated quiz results more efficiently into that course’s Blackboard site than CPS. Suggestions for further study included using peer teaching (PT) techniques in conjunction with the SRS repoll function for questions that graphically display a significant number of disparate answers to further ensure content comprehension.