Matt Salganik is teaching introductory statistics this year and would like to do lots of class-participation activities. He came up with the idea of giving each student a mini-whiteboard (the little ones that you can affix to a refrigerator door) and a marker, so that when questions come up in class, each student can sketch his or her answer and hold it up for him to see. Whiteboards are so useful in classrooms. That being said, they can also be very handy in other places too. In fact, we have a few high quality whiteboards in our office and I cannot imagine what we would do without them. It is so convenient to be able to jot down your ideas in one place where everyone can see them. I am always leaving important notes on the whiteboards in our office. They never let us down and they are incredibly affordable. Also, as amazing as technology can be, there is just something special about writing on a whiteboard in my opinion. Anyway, as you can imagine, this seems like a great idea to me. I had only two extra suggestions:
1. Make it one whiteboard for each pair of students. I have found that students can focus better in class when they are working in pairs. This way, it is harder for them to just gaze off into space and give up.
2. Hand the boards out at the beginning of each lecture and have the students hand them back at the end of each lecture. If you let the students keep the boards, they will inevitably forget to bring them to class, have to borrow from each other, etc.
Couldn't they just write on their own paper and hold that up? Would save having to carry around hundreds of whiteboards.
I agree that think/pair/square/share activities are effective at increasing class involvement.
This is interesting, helping to reduce peer stress and increase participation. But may I ask how big Salganik's class is? I mean, isn't it too costly and time-consuming if the class is as big as more than 50 people? (Like in many Asian countries.)
In this case my class is quite small, about 15 students, so I could bring whiteboards for them. However, if the class is larger, I think the idea from Hadley Wickham (posted above) of using regular paper would still work well.
Or even without whiteboards, I often try to get students to vote with their hands about the answers to questions. This forces students to really think about the questions instead of just listening and it quickly gives me feedback on which of them are understanding.
I used a mini-whiteboard in several of my Spanish classes for the same purpose. We'd pick them up at the beginning of class and drop them off at the end as Dr. Gelman suggests.
I found it very effective there. I recently bought one of these for myself to use at home. I use it to write out scratch work for mathematics, and then when I know what I want to write I put it on paper. I like it a lot.
I don't think using paper as a substitute is a good idea. Although every student should have paper, every student won't have a sharpie or marker so that you can actually read (or at least see) what they wrote. Also, the smooth flow of writing on the whiteboard becomes a subtle cognitive aid, allowing your ideas to flow freely from your head onto the board.
Paper appears more final, creating a small barrier that your thoughts must slip through. Whatever you write on the whiteboard is easily erased, allowing you to write whatever you think might be helpful, no matter how small or insignificant the idea.
Regarding pairs: you could give everyone whiteboards and still have them work in pairs. This way each student can write down their own thoughts and then the pair or group can write down their conclusion on a single board. I don’t think the whiteboard idea fixes any of the typical downsides to working together (caring student paired with uncaring student because they sat next to each other, etc.), although whiteboards might make pairs and groups work better, I’m not sure.
I had a chemistry teacher who used this whiteboard system in high school. I remember that it made lectures more meaningful since we were able to solve things as he wrote them instead of watching him solve them on the board (no thinking required, just mindless copying). He also involved the class as well, just as the OP said, with having us raise our boards when we had solved it.
Good stuff :)
Sometimes when I read this blog it's like reading about stuff happening on a different planet to the one I live on.
You don't need to go to Asia to find larger class sizes.
Most statistics lectures at several universities I have taught at in Australia regularly have well in excess of 100 students per lecture. The enrolment in one subject I have helped teach in the past at one university is something like 2500 – they fill the biggest lecture theatres on campus with repeated lectures, over and over again. And then they teach it again the next semester (with something around half the number, if I recall). I'm not sure what they're currently doing with tutorials in that subject, but when I was last working on it, "tutorials" were held in theatres with capacity of 150 – but that was many years ago – student numbers are higher now. Attendance at formal classes is reduced these days by doing a lot of stuff via the web, fortunately, or there wouldn't be enough room-hours for everyone. However, students do need some form of contact, which is available in a number of forms, but to my mind that contact is mostly being delivered in terribly inefficient ways, in terms of academic time per student helped (making already overworked academics lives quite difficult).
Undergraduate statistics subjects there with only 15 students would usually not get offered again, since there are larger subjects with far higher student-staff ratios where there's a desparate need for more staff. Indeed I've seen larger subjects than that terminated for similar reasons. Some of the second- and third- year subjects manage to get average tutorial sizes down to the high-20s.