Laura Cruz, Daniel Mallinson, and colleagues from Pennsylvania State University presented a session at the 2020 Lilly Conference on their analysis of the use of Nearpod engagement tool. Cruz, an instructional designer and educational researcher, briefly summarized educational research on student response systems and engagement. Cruz asked: “do clickers work?” adding that it depends on how we define clickers and many other factors. Nearpod is an audience response or student response system. It is web-based and seems similar to what we use, TopHat. There is a teacher view and a student view. You can display slides, embed certain (depends on webpage) settings, and control pace of what is displayed to students. Nearpod also integrates with Google Slides. Seventeen faculty and over eight thousand students used this software at Penn State. There are Nearpod activities instructor can select and tailor to their courses. The polling result visuals are helpful for instructors to reflect and implement active learning strategies. Nearpod also has some privacy settings for anonymous polling and moderation. Responses can include images and upvoting. William Illingworth mentioned several features and demonstrated their use. One neat feature is to decide if you play a video only on your computer or also on student devices. If an instructor clicks on the next slide, student presentations will advance too. Dan Mallinson talked about the instructor experience in their Introduction to American Government, both pre and during the pandemic. Mallinson used open ended questions and collaborate boards to solicit responses from students. Mallinson used PDFs and then added interaction/activities. Lessons learned that Mallinson mentioned were: decide which features/activities/content to include that enhance and are not distracting and it is possible to have a quiet class… and this tool provides a voice for some of these students. Student feedback suggested it helped students interact and share thoughts from different places.
Cruz described a study they conducted with faculty using Nearpod. They used a pre/post student survey design for courses taught by eight participating faculty for a total of about two hundred students. They used a validated survey called the Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ) that asks students about their engagement in the course and includes 23 Likert scale items of self reports of indicated levels of engagement. Overall they found… not much difference between pre/post. However, four faculty using the tool at higher levels and with more intentionality did show more significant differences: better course integration of the tool. The lesson may be that the tool itself isn’t sufficient; intentional use is needed. Cruz also mentions that the SCEQ survey may not be appropriate for measuring students engagement via technology like Nearpod: the first survey question is about student hand raising behavior. More aligned survey tools are needed, as suggested by Cruz. I enjoyed their presentation and the honest and thoughtful delivery by Cruz and colleagues. While tools like Nearpod and survey instruments like the SCEQ can have numerous features and years of use, respectively, intentionality of the integration of the software and appropriateness of the survey instrument should align. This is not a fault of the study; these findings and their implications suggest this is fertile territory for educational research.
