A significant number of college students find it challenging to stay focused in class. A recent survey of over 5,000 students across North America revealed that 55% of undergraduates and 38% of graduate students struggle to maintain interest during lectures. This lack of engagement not only hinders their ability to connect with the material but also impacts their retention and understanding.
For educators, this presents a serious challenge: how do you ensure that more than half of your students remain engaged and can apply what they learn to future coursework and their careers?
Poll Everywhere empowers higher education instructors to create interactive and engaging lessons that captivate students. Here are six strategies to leverage this powerful tool to enhance student attention and retention.
Introduce new material by tying it to existing knowledge
Students often need help to build connections with new material or understand how concepts relate to their knowledge. One way to engage students at the beginning of class is to tap into their prior knowledge. This could range from reviewing content from the previous week to seeing what they already know about a new concept.
The Poll Everywhere Word Cloud Activity is an excellent tool for these warm-ups. Students can contribute as many words as possible related to a topic to create a word cloud representing what everyone knows. This can be a rapid-fire activity where students brainstorm as many words and phrases as possible about a particular topic, exploring the far reaches of their minds to find prior knowledge.
This activity can also help you, as the instructor, understand what foundational information needs to be covered and what your students are ready to build on.
Incorporate questions and answers into the discussion
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The calls to move away from lecture-based instruction and rote memorization are getting louder as more students want engaging activities in the classroom environment. This can be challenging for professors who have established lesson plans and are introducing new material through class lectures. However, you can make small changes to the classroom experience to better engage students.
For example, use the Q&A Activity by Poll Everywhere to facilitate discussions throughout your lecture. Students can ask questions about the material, and their peers can upvote the most relevant queries. You can also pose questions mid-lecture and give students a few minutes to submit written answers that foster natural discussions.
You and your students get more out of your classes by incorporating engaging discussions into your lectures. Your students might also be surprised at how much they retain.
Support visual learners with Clickable Images
An estimated 65% of people are visual learners and 90% of the information that the brain processes is visual. Studies show that the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text alone. Another way to make small but powerful modifications to engage students is to add imagery to your lectures. You can start small with a PowerPoint presentation with relevant graphics or try the Clickable Image Activity from Poll Everywhere. Students can click anywhere on the image and drop a pin to answer your question.
Clickable images engage students because they turn visual elements into kinesthetic ones. Students can physically interact with the photo and contribute. Test this feature out and see how your students respond.
Poll students through multiple-choice or ranking-based surveys
As college students transition from high school youth into adulthood, they start to form their own opinions and ideas. You can help students better connect to the material by asking them to share these ideas with the class.
Try the Ranking Activity, which allows students to rank options from best to worst. You can also incorporate standard Multiple-Choice questions that either poll students based on their opinions or test their knowledge throughout the lecture.
The Survey Activity alone can help you gather feedback from students live or asynchronously. Educators can conduct the survey early on in the class and then again toward the end of the semester to see how student comprehension has changed. This is a great way to evaluate how engaged your students are.
Foster discussion with Open-ended questions
The benefit of asking multiple-choice questions is that students can eliminate options and make educated guesses if they aren’t sure about the answers. However, open-ended questions are harder. Students either know the answer, or they don’t. If you want to challenge your higher-education students, switch from a multiple-choice activity to an Open-ended one.
Open-ended questions can also be used to foster discussion. You can collect student opinions about particular ideas and events by starting with open-ended prompts. This can help you understand the beliefs of your students as you introduce concepts to the class.
Open-ended questions are more flexible than you think. Play with these queries and see how simple prompts can start in-depth discussions.
Tap into the competitive nature of your students
No matter the class size or complexity of the subject, students naturally possess a competitive drive to excel, even in low-stress environments. As an educator, you can harness this competitive spirit to boost engagement and participation in your lessons. A Poll Everywhere Competition effectively encourages students to demonstrate their knowledge while competing for points and ranks on the leaderboard.
Students answer a series of multiple-choice questions you created to test their knowledge. With gamified elements like a timer, weighted points based on correctness and speed, and a leaderboard, your students’ competitive side will keep them wanting to pay attention in class to win.
Engage students better with Poll Everywhere
You don’t have to revolutionize your lesson plans to engage students effectively. Start with minor modifications that break up lengthy lectures and allow students to share their opinions and prove what they know. Adding activities to the start and end of the class period can also help you keep students engaged and test how much they learned.
Update your higher education classroom with Poll Everywhere. There are free plans for educators who want to test this tool and additional options if you want to scale your queries to the rest of your students. See how your students better connect with the material and retain important information with our games and activities.
