Last night my intro statistics students worked through an Interactive Reading Assignment for measures of central tendency. In class today they will be working with four data sets and computing various measures of central tendency. To collect their work I will run through a Learning Catalytics module asking them for certain specific answers.

My plan is for students to work individually while consulting with each other. If they have different results it will be a great opportunity to check each others data entry and computational processes.

Learning Catalytics ability to collect numerical responses is definitely an advantage over the clickers of old that only allowed multiple choice answers. It also does a great job of evaluating numerical answers – it treats all of these as equivalent: 0.6, 0.60, .6, 3/5, 9/15, …

I sometimes use Learning Catalytics in this fashion to collect some written homework. I assign a handful of problems the night before, then collect certain answers at the very beginning of class. I also mix in some interpretation questions or conceptual questions that were not asked in the homework. Sometimes I follow up with a new similar problem to make sure they can do it in class. It’s very efficient and flexible for collecting some “by hand” problems.