Which student activation techniques work better?

Elena Paltseva Department of Economics, Copenhagen University Project Which student activation techniques work better? Contents Introduction... 2 Background: Microeconomics 3... 3 Spring 2009 run of the course... 3 Student activation techniques used in the Spring 2009... 3 Questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students... 5 Results... 6 Student s evaluation of activation techniques... 6 Teacher student interaction... 8 Different student groups... 9 Open question outcome... 11 Fall 2009 run of the course... 11 Student activation techniques used in the Fall 2009... 11 Questionnaire to the Fall 2009 students... 12 Results... 12 Student s evaluation of activation techniques... 13 Teacher student interaction... 15 Level of problem difficulty... 16 Conclusion... 17 References... 17 Appendix 1: Questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students... 18 Appendix 2: Questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students... 19

Introduction This project addresses students activation in the 3 rd year undergraduate course Microeconomics 3. The course aims at teaching the students the basics of the modern game theory, which they can then apply as an analytic tool in many economic fields. While the course gets reasonably close to achieving its goals, as judged by the exam performance and discussions with former students, there still seems be a substantial number of passive/surface learners. So the question that I address in this project is how to improve on this dimension by using student activation techniques. The analysis concentrates on two subsequent runs of the course Spring and Fall semesters 2009 respectively. In the Spring 2009 run of the course I tried to employ a number of activation techniques, such as a) different modes of asking questions to the audience during the lectures; b) interaction in a game form, aimed at introducing new material, c)online experiments on different strategic situations, etc. However, I was not sure which proportion of the audience (and whom exactly) I reached with these techniques. Also, I was not sure which of these techniques were better perceived by the students and contributed more to their learning. The Fall 2009 run of the course provides additional difficulties for students activation, as the class size more than doubled since last semester (from around 80 to 210 students), and the lecture room used for the course is too big for the current class (500+ seats). Both these aspects suggest the need for revision and updating of student activation techniques used in the course. In this project, motivated by KNUD and IUP, I aim at studying students perception of different activation techniques and extending the range of employed activities to see if this can improve students motivation and engagement in the course. The project consists of 3 parts: 1. A questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students addressing their subjective perception of the techniques employed in the previous version of the course. 2. Modification and extension of the student activation techniques based on the Spring 2009 students responses/knud inspiration/specificity of the current class and course. 3. A questionnaire to the current students on the newly adjusted techniques, aimed at identifying the most successful techniques in students subjective perception of their own learning within a more demanding large class learning environment. A possible future extension of this project would be to evaluate the impact of the adjusted techniques on the students performance through the comparison of the final grades of past and current student generations. However, currently this option is not feasible, as the grade for the Fall 2009 course are not yet available. The results from point 3 and extension will be used to improve the next run of the course. 2

Background: Microeconomics 3 Microeconomics 3 is a compulsory course for 3rd year undergraduate students at the Economics Department of Copenhagen University. Some visiting Master students choose to take it as well. The course aims at teaching the students the basics of the modern game theory, which they can then apply as an analytic tool in many economic fields. More precisely, after the completion of the course the students should be able to outline a number of game theoretical concepts, explain the relation between them and their relevance/range of applications, apply these concepts to solve game theoretical problems, and, finally, analyse general strategic situation in related economic fields from a game theoretic point of view. The course consists of 3 hours lectures/3 hours exercise classes a week. There are two midterm exercises, one take home and one in class, and passing both is compulsory for being allowed to the final exam. Final examination in the course is a 2 hour closedbook exam which consists of 3 4 game theoretical and applied economic problems. The course is based on a main text book and a number of extra notes. Lecture notes are provided for each lecture. Problem sets are provided for the exercise classes. The course has been offered since the academic year of 2007/08. Until (and including) the Spring semester of 2009 it has been taught twice a year, in the Fall and in the Spring semester. Typical enrolment in the Fall semester was around 130 students, in the Spring semester around 80 90 students. In the Fall 2009 the department announced a change in the curriculum, according to which from 2010 the course would be offered only once a year. As a result, the enrolment in the Fall semester of 2009 increased to app. 230 students. In addition to it, the lecture room used for the course in the Fall semester of 2009 is designed for more than 500 students, which only compounds the problem of teaching a large class. Spring 2009 run of the course Student activation techniques used in the Spring 2009 In the Spring semester of 2009 I tried to create more active learning process through combining conventional lecture based teaching with a number of student activation techniques. In particular, I employed different modes of asking questions to the audience during the lectures, such as a) questions that assume answers from individual students, receiving an answer and discussing it; b) questions that assume answers from individual students, collecting a number of different answers without discussion, having an entire class vote over collected answers, and discussing results of the vote. 3

Later in the course, motivated by KNUD and individual discussions with some of the (more interested) students, I introduced an additional group work based question mode: c) asking students to discuss questions in small groups before answering, and then discussing the results with the entire class. The idea there was that each subsequent question mode (from (a) to (c)) would release the pressure on individual students and stimulate productive student student interaction during the lecture, thereby increasing active student participation. On the other hand, employing all three questions modes would introduce important variability in the learning process, and help coping with free riding problem among students associated with group based approaches. There were also non question based activation techniques used in class: d) interaction in a game form, aimed at introducing new material, or getting a particular insight into the already studied material, and e) pre lecture participation in on line experiments on different strategic situations, followed by discussion of results in class. The motivation behind game form interaction (d) was that it would provide the students with a low pressure and fun way of getting an experience they can later relate to, when studying rather abstract economic and game theoretical concepts and models. Further, it introduced an entertainment aspect in the lectures, which would generally have positive impact on students attention afterwards. A typical example of such an game can be found in Box 1. The opportunity for e learning via on line experiments (e) was provided by Professor Ariel Rubinstein, Tel Aviv University. Professor Rubinstein has created a website, http://gametheory.tau.ac.il/, where participants face different game theoretical and strategic situations and try to react to them to the best of their intuitive feeling or rational motivation. Participation in these experiments allowed the students to relate their intuitive understanding to theoretical concepts discussed in class, which would deepen their learning. Further, the discussion of the relationship between the theoretical predictions and actual experimental results would help the students to build a better picture of advantages and limitations of game theoretical approach to economics. BOX 1. Karameller game One example of the game form interaction used in Micro 3 teaching is a game related to so called Betrand price competition. In this economic model firms set prices to sell identical goods to the customers. Customers buy the good from the cheapest provider. One can show that in the absence of communication between the firms and under full information, each of the firms will try to price just below the competitor s price in order to make its good the cheapest one and to sell it to the consumers. As a result, in equilibrium the price set by both firms will be exactly equal to the 4

costs of producing the good, and firms will have zero profit. Before the students were exposed to the abovementioned theoretical results the teacher asked them to play the following game (the rules were presented on the whiteboard): Divide into groups. Each group has some virtual good I want to buy from you. I have a pack of karameller (100 pieces?) and I am willing to pay up to the whole pack to get the good from you. Each group (without talking to the other groups) writes on a piece of paper how many karameller it wants from me for that magic good. I buy from the group with the cheapest offer. Students had some 5 10 minutes to discuss the game, decide on their offer, and submit it. The results of the game were summarized and presented to the students just after the lecture break. Typically there would be a whole variety of answers, but the winning offer was always close or equal to zero (and sometimes even negative, like in 2009 run of the course, when the winning offer was 4 (minus 4) karameller). The game per se and the discussion of its results provided students with good intuition for subsequent analysis of the Betrand price competition model. Questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students The questionnaire was addressing two important aspects of students perception of activities (a) (e) described above: the students were asked how much they liked these activities and how much these activities have contributed to their learning. Further, to get a better insight into the driving forces behind the answer to the above questions the students were asked to share their preferences concerning teacherstudent communication, such as asking and answering questions. More precisely, the students were asked about their willingness to answer teacher s questions/ask teacher a question in different environments (e.g. individually or during group work). Students were also asked to provide suggestions concerning student activation techniques and further comment on the course Some statistical information, such as gender, age, nationality and final grade in Micro 3 was also collected. The full list of questions can be found in Appendix 1. There were 18 students from the Spring 2009 run of the course participating in the survey, 33 % of the female, 100% Danish, average age 23.6 years. 5

Results Student s evaluation of activation techniques The response of the students to the activation techniques mentioned above was rather positive, as indicated by Table 1: Table 1: Spring 2009 students: Q1 How did you like the following class activities in Micro 3? I liked it It was ok It was boring Listening to the lectures 94% 6% 0% Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards Playing games (for example, when the teacher was buying a good from you in exchange for karameller) 28% 61% 11% 67% 28% 6% 61% 33% 6% 78% 17% 6% Participating in online experiments 72% 28% 0% As expected, the students feel most uncomfortable when they are expected to express their individual opinions in front of the entire class. Group discussions and voting for answers are perceived as much more acceptable activities. Further, activities that involve different sensory modes of learning (reading seeing talking over doing, etc.) and create experience, such as playing games or participating in experiments, are better regarded by the students, again, as expected (see, e.g. Biggs and Tang, p.96). Entertainment component (in games) also adds to the joy of the activity. Interestingly, listening to the lectures has the highest rank in terns of students liking. I will return to the discussion of this phenomenon later. An important thing to mention is that students seem to reflect on their learning mode and relate it to the suggested activities. That is, they distinguish between the fun aspects of a particular activity, and its usefulness for their learning, as indicated by the difference in their answers to Q1 ( How did you like the activity ) and Q3 ( How much did the activity contribute to your learning ). 6

Table 2: Spring 2009 students: Q3 How much did the following activities contribute to your learning in Micro 3? A lot Noticeably At the average level Little Not at all Listening to the lectures 67% 33% 0% 0% 0% Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually 6% 17% 39% 33% 6% Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering 17% 39% 33% 11% 0% Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards 22% 17% 44% 11% 6% Playing games (for example, when the teacher was buying a good from you in exchange for karameller) 17% 50% 28% 6% 0% Participating in online experiments 17% 39% 33% 0% 11% For example, if we collect the three positive categories of answers for Q3 ( A lot, Noticeably and At the average level ) and compare it to sum of answers in two positive category in Q1 ( I liked it and It was ok ), we can see that some activities are found less useful than the others, while being comparably enjoyed by the students. In particular this concerns answering questions individually. 7

Notice, however, that students find listening to the lectures both useful and enjoyable, despite the existing view in the literature that traditional teaching may be less interesting for the students, and may also promote a surface approach to learning (see e.g. K. Struyven et al. for an overview of the literature). There could be several explanations to this result: first, it can be explained by some kind of inertia in the students who are used to traditional lecturing approach; alternatively the students may misinterpret the question, thinking of listening to the lectures not as of passive process of listening but as of process of participating in all activities that a lecture session involves; further, as indicated by K. Struyven et al, there are some circumstances under which traditional lectures result in deeper learning than student activation techniques; perhaps, some of these circumstances were (unintentionally) reproduced during Micro 3. Teacher student interaction The following two questions allow us to verify that the findings of the previous analysis about different question modes are driven by the group pressure on expressing individual opinions. They also allow to check to which extent the question modes described above can be used in class, and how much space there is for bilateral teacher student interaction in form of questions/answers. This time I do not specifically ask about activities in Micro 3 instead the questions concern more general preferences of a student. Table 3: Spring 2009 students: Q5 Are you/would you be comfortable answering teacher's questions? Yes Depends Not really When students are expected to answer individually 11% 50% 39% 8

When students are expected to answer individually in case there are many other students in your class who have done it 33% 33% 33% When students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering 61% 28% 11% When the answer is chosen on the base of students voting and discussed afterwards 56% 28% 17% As can be seen from Table 3, the group pressure is indeed high even in an environment when it is socially acceptable to ask questions no more than a third of all students would be unconditionally comfortable answering teacher s questions. This number almost doubles when the answer responsibility is shared through group work or voting. Table 4: Spring 2009 students: Q6 Are you/would you be comfortable asking teacher a question? Yes Depends Not really During the class 17% 61% 22% During the class if there are many other students who do it 44% 33% 22% After the class/during the break 94% 0% 6% After being asked to discuss in small groups and come up with one question from a group. 44% 39% 17% Moreover, as indicated by Table 4, not so many students are willing to ask questions in class, if this is not a common practice. However, almost half of the students are ready to come up with questions if it is socially acceptable in this class, or if questions are outcome of a group work. Further, almost nobody has a problem asking teacher questions in person. This suggests a strong teacher responsibility for creating a class atmosphere that would stimulate discussions and change class social norm to more active interaction on teacherstudents and also student student level. Different student groups Further, an interesting distinction arises if we compare the answers of the students who got higher final grade to the answers of the students whose grade was below median level. 1 One can see from Table 5 that students who eventually got higher gradews were more willing to work individually than students who got lower grades. They were also less interested in entertaining activities, such as playing games. 1 There were 18 students from the Spring 2009 run of the course who answered the questionnaire. None of them has failed the final exam. However, 9 of them had a grade below or equal to 7, and another 9 above 7, so they were subdivided in two halves according to their final grade. 9

Table 5: Spring 2009 students How did you like the following class activities in Micro 3? (averages) Higher grade group Lower grade group Listening to the lectures 1 1.1 Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards Playing games (for example, when the teacher was buying a good from you in exchange for karameller) 1.4 2.2 1.3 1.4 1.6 1.3 1.6 1 Participating in online experiments 1.3 1.2 Coding: I liked it =1, It was ok =2, It was boring =3 Table 6 demonstrates that the same conclusion is true as concerns activities that these two groups of students find useful. On top of being more open to individualistic interaction, higher grade group seems to get more from traditional lecturing, and less from entertainment and experience activities. Table 6: Spring 2009 students How much did the following activities contribute to your learning in Micro 3? (averages) Higher grade group Lower grade group Listening to the lectures 1.1 1.6 Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards Playing games (for example, when the teacher was buying a good from you in exchange for karameller) 3 3.3 2.4 2.3 3 2.2 2.6 1.9 10

Participating in online experiments 2.9 2.1 Coding: A lot =1, Noticeably =2, At the average level =3, Little =4, Not at all =5 A possible explanation for this observation can be as follows: more successful group may be more efficient in keeping themselves active during the lectures and extracting useful information from the lectures and lecturer. That would suggest relatively less benefit for them from additional activation techniques. A very useful lesson to learn from this exercise is that there is a demand for all different types of student activation techniques, coming from different segments of student population, which needs to be taken into account when designing the teaching for the new run of the course. Open question outcome Finally, in an open question Are there some other activities what in your opinion would benefit the students in Micro 3 class? there were two noticeable points to mention: Some students argue that the questions asked in class are too easy. One student came up with a suggestion of quasi Problem Based Learning: Another way to activate students during class could be by asking us to do certain calculations ourselves. You could choose one point in the lecture where the next step is not very difficult, explain the method to be used and then ask us to do it with our neighbor and then you could go through it on the blackboard afterwards. Both these points needed to be taken into account in the Fall 2009 class. Fall 2009 run of the course Student activation techniques used in the Fall 2009 The experience with the Spring 2009 run of the course, the results of the questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students, and the specifics of Fall 2009 course in terms of enrolment etc. suggested a number of points to be implemented in the Fall 2009 run of the course: 1. All student activation techniques used in the Spring 2009 run of the course (the list (a) (e) from the previous section) should be employed in the Fall 2009 as well; 2. The emphasis should be somewhat shifted from individual oriented techniques to group work, especially taking into account large class and large lecture room problems; 11

3. One should try to employ some kind of PBL in class, for example, by giving students problems to solve in groups and discussing them on the whiteboard afterwards; 4. One should make sure that the questions asked in class are of suitable difficulty level; 5. There is a need for significant teacher s effort to be put into creating a class atmosphere that stimulates interaction during the lectures. In view of the objectives above the list of student activation techniques (a) (e) was extended by f) Solving small problems in groups before discussing them on a whiteboard. The idea behind this technique was to give students a possibility to practice the knowledge they just attained, to provide them with a way of resolving common misconceptions right on place, and eventually to help them achieve deeper learning. Questionnaire to the Fall 2009 students There were no major differences between the questionnaires to the Spring 2009 and the Fall 2009 students. The few changes were Including the problem solving activity (f) into the list of evaluated activities; Asking the students about the level of difficulty of the problems; Not collecting information about the grades, as the questionnaire was given to the students in the middle of the course. The text of the questionnaire can be found in Appendix 2. There were 42 students who answered, 43% of them female, 83% Danish, average age 23 years. Results In this section I choose to mostly concentrate on the results from the Fall 2009 questionnaire, providing only limited comparison of the results from the two waves of questionnaires. The reason for it is two fold: first of all, large class and large lecture room of the Fall 2009 course create serious additional difficulties both for teaching and learning. This is likely to make the students judgements not comparable between these two classes, with a larger class opinions having negative bias. Second, I believe that the sample of the Spring 2009 students who chose to answer the questionnaire were, on average, more interested/motivated they chose to participate in the survey in the Fall 2009, 3 month after their own course was over, so that their personal benefit of it was zero. On the other hand, the Fall 2009 students were asked to answer in the middle of the course. This would also complicate the comparison between the answers of these two populations. Thus, my mail goal for this section would be seeing whether the students relative perception of different activation techniques changes for a larger class. I will also assess the 12

effectiveness of newly introduced PBL technique and discuss the teacher student and student student interaction aspects in a large class. Student s evaluation of activation techniques Not surprisingly, individual oriented activation techniques are the least popular also in the large class, as indicated by Table 7. Listening to the lectures continues to be the most popular activity, followed by playing games. Importantly, introducing PBL represented by exercise solving in small groups turns out to be highly successful: half of the students like it and more than ¾ are positive about it. Table 7: Fall 2009 students: Q1 How did you like the following class activities in Micro 3? I liked it It was ok It was boring Listening to the lectures 69% 29% 2% Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually 10% 60% 31% Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering 36% 33% 29% Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards 41% 29% 31% Playing games (for example, when the teacher was buying a good from you in exchange for karameller) 64% 26% 10% Solving small problems in groups before discussing them on a whiteboard 50% 26% 24% Participating in online experiments 45% 41% 14% Similar ranking holds for the question addressing the usefulness of different activities for learning (see Table 8). Again, lectures are regarded very highly, and experience and entertainment activities (PBL and playing games) follow. Table 8: Fall 2009 students: Q3 How much did the following activities contribute to your learning in Micro 3? A lot At the average Noticeably level Little Not at all Listening to the lectures 43% 33% 14% 10% 43% 13

Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually 7% 7% 29% 36% 7% Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering 5% 36% 21% 19% 5% Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards 12% 19% 29% 21% 12% Playing games (for example, when the teacher was buying a good from you in exchange for karameller) 19% 31% 33% 7% 19% Solving small problems in groups before discussing them on a whiteboard 12% 43% 24% 12% 12% Participating in online experiments 7% 17% 36% 31% 7% Furthermore, the relative usefulness of different activities seems to be very similar in large and medium sizes classes (ignoring the abovementioned negative opinion bias of a large class). This can be seen at the following graph, which summarizes the three positive categories of answers for Q3 ( A lot, Noticeably and At the average level ) for both populations of the students: This finding suggests that the responses from the Spring 2009 students can be indeed used as a guideline when teaching a much larger class of Fall 2009. 14

As in the Spring 2009, students may find activities fun, but not very useful in learning. Interestingly, problem solving is the only activity that is considered marginally more useful than fun. This again suggests that introducing this student activation technique into the teaching seems to be a very good idea. Teacher student interaction Looking at Table 9 one can see that indeed a big room seems to take its toll in terms of hindering students' activities: there are many more students now who would not answer individual questions even if it is socially acceptable. Further this is also true for group based activities and voting for the correct answer. Table 9. Are you/would you be comfortable answering teacher's questions? Spring 2009 students Fall 2009 students Yes Depends Not really Yes Depends Not really When students are expected to answer individually 11% 50% 39% 12% 33% 55% When students are expected to answer individually in case there are many other students in your class who have done it 33% 33% 33% 17% 38% 45% When students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering 61% 28% 11% 19% 50% 31% 15

When the answer is chosen on the base of students voting and discussed afterwards 56% 28% 17% 38% 31% 31% However, there is still some hope, as indicated by Table 10. While the proportion of people who are not willing to ask teacher a question is still higher in large class, the proportion of people who are unconditionally ready to ask questions is also higher, at least for some types of environments (most strikingly, for asking questions during the class). Table 10 Are you/would you be comfortable asking teacher a question? Spring 2009 students Fall 2009 students Yes Depends Not really Yes Depends Not really During the class 17% 61% 22% 26% 38% 36% During the class if there are many other students who do it 44% 33% 22% 45% 21% 33% After the class/during the break 94% 0% 6% 86% 12% 2% After being asked to discuss in small groups and come up with one question from a group. 44% 39% 17% 26% 43% 31% There could a number of reasons for this finding: for example, my attempts to create an class atmosphere stimulating student teacher interaction during the lecture may have some (marginal) effect on a subset of students; alternatively, there were some foreign students who participated in the survey in the Fall 2009, and they may have a different cultural approach to interaction during the lecture. Level of problem difficulty Finally, it seems that after the adjustment based on the Spring semester students comments, the majority of students do not seem to find the suggested problems and questions too easy, as indicated by Table 11. Table 11: Fall 2009 students, Q 5 Do you find the questions that the teacher asks in class typically Too easy 19% On average, about right level of difficulty 66,7% Too difficult 2,4% 16

Uneven: sometimes too easy, sometimes too difficult 11,9% Conclusion This project concerns a 3 rd year undergraduate course Microeconomics 3 taught at the Economics Department of Copenhagen University. The analysis concentrates on student activation techniques used in two subsequent runs of the course Spring and Fall semesters 2009 respectively. As indicated by the questionnaires posed to the two student populations, students seem to respond positively to activation, both in form of different question modes, games, on line experiments and problem based learning. The results for the middle size class of Spring 2009 suggest that, while techniques based on group work are better perceived by the student body, there is an indication that the subsample of stronger students may prefer techniques stressing individual participation. Therefore there is a space for both types of student activation techniques, at least for middle sized classes. At the time of writing this project it was not possible to directly evaluate the preferences of students of different levels in a large class of Fall 2009. However, the analysis in the project suggests that the relative perception of different activation techniques seems to be very similar in large and small class. Therefore it is natural to expect that there is a demand for both individual based and group based student activation techniques also in a large class. The analysis also indicates that the techniques based on creating experiences and relating knowledge to practice, such as games, on line experiments and problem based learning, seem to produce a stronger impact on students learning, at least in their own perception. Therefore, these techniques should be more actively used in this course. There is always a space for extending the range of student activation techniques within the course setting limitations. For example, one can introduce mixed individual group activities, student posed questions etc. I plan to try these new approaches in future runs of the course, while taking into account the insights from this study. References 1. Bigs and Tang (2009), Teaching for Quality Learning at University, 3rd edition, McGraw Hill Education 2. Dixit (2005), Restoring fun to game theory, The Journal of Economic Education 3. Struyven, Dochy, Janssens and Gielen (2006), On the dynamics of students approaches to learning: The effects of the teaching/learning environment, Learning and Instruction 16 (2006) 17

Appendix 1: Questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students 1. How do you like the following class activities in Micro 3 a. Listening to the lectures b. Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually c. Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering d. Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student's voting and discussed afterwards e. Playing games (for example, when the teacher was "buying a good" from you in exchange for karameller) f. Participating in online experiments 2. How do you rate your own benefit from the lectures in Micro 3 in the Fall 2008? a. Very large b. Large c. Average d. Little e. Very little 3. How much did the following activities contribute to your learning in Micro 3? a. Listening to the lectures b. Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually c. Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering d. Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student's voting and discussed afterwards e. Playing games (for example, when the teacher was "buying a good" from you in exchange for karameller) f. Participating in online experiments 4. Are there some other activities what in your opinion would benefit the students in Micro 3 class? 5. Are you/would you be comfortable answering teacher's questions a. When students are expected to answer individually b. When students are expected to answer individually in case there are many other students in your class who have done it c. When students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering d. When the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards 6. Are you/would you be comfortable asking teacher a question a. During the class b. During the class in case there are many other students who do it c. After the class/during the break 18

d. After being asked to discuss in small groups and come up with 1 question from a group. 7. Did you start reading the Gibbons' book? If yes, when? a. August b. September c. October d. Did not start yet 8. Your gender a. Male b. Female 9. Your current age 10. Are you a Danish or an international student? a. Danish b. International 11. What was your grade in Micro 3 in the Spring semester 2009? Appendix 2: Questionnaire to the Spring 2009 students 1. How do you like the following class activities in Micro 3 a. Listening to the lectures b. Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually c. Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering d. Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student's voting and discussed afterwards e. Playing games (for example, when the teacher was "buying a good" from you in exchange for karameller) f. Solving small problems in groups before discussing them on a whiteboard g. Participating in online experiments 2. How do you rate your own benefit from the lectures in Micro 3 in the Fall 2008? a. Very large b. Large c. Average d. Little e. Very little 3. How much did the following activities contribute to your learning in Micro 3? a. Listening to the lectures b. Answering teacher's questions when students are expected to answer individually c. Answering teacher's questions when students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering d. Answering teacher's questions when the answer is chosen on the base of student's voting and discussed afterwards e. Playing games (for example, when the teacher was "buying a good" from you in exchange for karameller) 19

f. Solving small problems in groups before discussing them on a board g. Participating in online experiments 4. Are there some other activities what in your opinion would benefit the students in Micro 3 class? 5. Do you find the questions that the teacher asks in class typically a. Too easy b. On average, about right level of difficulty c. Too difficult d. Uneven: sometimes too easy, sometimes too difficult 6. Are you/would you be comfortable answering teacher's questions a. When students are expected to answer individually b. When students are expected to answer individually in case there are many other students in your class who have done it c. When students are asked to discuss the question in small groups before answering d. When the answer is chosen on the base of student s voting and discussed afterwards 7. Are you/would you be comfortable asking teacher a question a. During the class b. During the class in case there are many other students who do it c. After the class/during the break d. After being asked to discuss in small groups and come up with 1 question from a group. 8. When teacher asks you to think about something/refresh your knowledge of something before the next class, how often do you typically do it? a. in 75 100% cases b. in 50 75% cases c. in 25 50% cases d. in less than 25% cases 9. Did you start reading the Gibbons' book? If yes, when? a. August b. September c. October d. Did not start yet 10. Your gender a. Male b. Female 11. Your current age 12. Are you a Danish or an international student? a. Danish b. International 20