Assessing student understanding of important concepts during a lecture in the College of Dental Medicine

Professor Roseanna Graham in the College of Dental Medicine uses an audience response system (TurningPoint) to assess student understanding during lectures in her course. After teaching for about 10-15 minutes, Dr. Graham will project a polling question for students to respond to related to the topic she just taught about. Through the everyone’s responses to the polling questions, students are able to assess their own understanding of what was just taught and the faculty member is also able to gauge her students’ understanding of the content. Depending on the percentage of the class that got the answer correct/incorrect, Dr. Graham spends extra time to explain a concept or moves on with her lecture.

Note: This is an actual image from Dr. Graham’s course. Notice how the correct answer is A but most students chose B.