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Pause for a Poll

Before I started graduate school, I was nervous that I had forgotten how to be a student. How could I be sure I wouldn’t immediately fall behind or forget everything? In an effort to calm those feelings, I did a little internet research and ended up reading a book called A Mind for Numbers (Oakley, 2014), a book that explains how to learn effectively. I still remember the parts of it that surprised me, including my main takeaway that, although I personally feel compelled to read things from start to finish, that’s actually not the most efficient way to learn quickly. Once classes started, I was excited to see that my professors used some of the approaches I’d learned from the book in their teaching practices. Here’s one that was very effective for me.


Red and blue dice arranged like a Tetris game

Poll Everywhere

The first course I took was Foundations of Computer Science (CS), otherwise known as Discrete Math for people without a CS undergraduate degree, taught by Professor Erin McLeish. It was online but synchronous, with lectures supplemented by video explanations, detailed notes, and practice problems posted in the NYU Learning Management System, Brightspace. The expectation was that we would read and review the material ahead of time, and then live meetings would focus on reviewing practice problems in detail and answering questions and diving deeper into concepts as needed. (I learned later this is known as a flipped classroom (NYU Login Required)).


At the beginning of the first session, Professor McLeish explained the poll process and posted a link to a tool called Poll Everywhere in the Zoom chat, along with a code for joining her class poll. Then, in each class she would pause four to six times to ask multiple choice poll questions related to the lecture, usually about some sort of fact or calculation. The questions didn’t count for much beyond participation, but if you missed answering one, you were basically giving up free points. It was worth trying to answer every question.


As a student, I enjoyed the polls because they helped me stay focused on the class, and when I got questions wrong, they helped me realize I was confused while I still had a chance to ask for help. At the same time, the polls were timed, which could be a little stressful when the answer wasn’t obvious. As the semester progressed, I learned to look out for questions that most people got right but that I got wrong. This was almost always

a sign that I deeply did not get it. Learning that I needed to work harder in certain areas gave me a chance to ask the professor in office hours, peers in my study group, or find other resources. And it ultimately helped me earn a respectable overall grade in the course.


One of the tips in A Mind for Numbers is to test yourself as you learn (Oakley, 2014, p. 256), and Poll Everywhere is a great way to accomplish that. It can be hard to take in a lot of new information all at once without pausing to process. A poll question can be a very helpful way to take a break and reflect on new concepts. I’m sure it takes a lot of effort to prepare a good set of poll questions for every lecture, but as a learner, I really appreciated that opportunity to check my understanding (NYU Login Required).



References

Oakley, B. A. (2014). {a mind for numbers}: How to excel at math and science (even if you flunked algebra). TarcherPerigree, an imprint of Penguin Random House.


 
 
 
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