PROMOTING QUALITY ASSURANCE IN CHEMISTRY LEARNING USING “PERSONAL RESPONSE SYSTEMS”

It is well known, that questions posed to students during class may stimulate active learning. However, only low response rates are possible within large audience and thus professors end up delivering information with minimal student interactions. Electronic audience response systems, also known as personal response systems (PRS) or clickers, are relatively recent devices that are being used in many disciplines and educational levels to promote active-learning. Their correct use may provide accurate and rapid feedback on students’ understanding or misconceptions thus increasing interactions especially for a large audiences.
In this work, PRS have been used at different stages of the subject “Data treatment and quality control in an analytical chemistry laboratory” of the last course of the degree in Chemistry of the University of La Laguna. In this project, students were asked to elaborate different multiple choice questions among which the professor selected a good number of them as well as included new ones for each PRS session. PRS, which were used for the first time in this subject, highly attracted students’ attention and provided a very good interaction with the professor as well as between them. Results showed that the fact that students were asked to create their own questions as well as to answer them in public and defend the way questions and answers were proposed, clearly increased learning performance.