Getting Students to Ask Up

One way to get students engaged in learning is by getting them to self-test and generate their own questions.

Goal: To enhance learning that occurs in passive lectures by engaging students in question-generation.

Background:

The instructor created a website called AskUp.net that allowed students to generate and share questions based on class material, homework assignments, readings, videos, etc. During the activity, students registered onto the website, generated questions, and tagged them with the subject of the question.

Procedure:

Comments:

The instructor shared several benefits regarding this activity method:

  • Research has demonstrated significant benefits of practice testing (self-testing or taking practice tests). Having learners generate their own questions and answers is a highly efficient method of learning and results in
    • increased comprehension of material
    • improved thought complexity, initiative, and engagement with the material
    • higher-ordered questions
    • increased conceptual reasoning and problem solving abilities
    • long-term retention as learners have to retrieve information from memory

The instructor also advises to employ Bloom's taxonomy. For instance, questions asked can be assessed through the framework of “REMEMBERING, UNDERSTANDING, APPLYING, ANALYZING, EVALUATING, and CREATING”.

Submitted by Jonathan Hausmann, Elliott Yates, Sarah Schachman, Katherine Loboda, Liza McPherson, Hana Kim, Raymond Kim, JN Fang, Rich Schwartzstein; Department of Rheumatology

 

 

learning_styles_physiology_poster_copy.pdf435 KB
askup_activity_2.pdf31 KB
ask_up_activity.pdf38 KB