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Click-on-Diagram Questions: Using Clickers to Engage Students in Visual-Spatial Reasoning

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Active Learning in College Science

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Abstract

Rapidly advancing classroom technology now enables students to click on their cell phone, tablet, or laptop computer to answer questions that once required proprietary clicker devices. Instructors can now upload an image and ask students to respond by clicking directly on the image. Click-on-diagram (COD) questions are an open-ended response option that can reveal students’ understanding of a visual representation and/or a geologic structure or process. This tool is well suited to help students negotiate the spatially complex nature of the geosciences. We present three examples, about geologic time, erosion in streams, and Steno’s law of lateral continuity, to demonstrate how the patterns of students’ errors present an instructional opportunity to facilitate visual-spatial skills. Ongoing work suggests that CODs can be used to develop a range of students’ visualization skills in large lectures on a broad range of science topics.

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Acknowledgments

Data presented in this chapter were gathered under exempt NIU-IRB protocol #HS17-0235. The project was funded as part of the GETSpatial (NSF-1640800) and GeoClick (NSF-1835950) projects. The authors would like to thank Glenn Dolphin and Emina Mesic for their contributions to this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA

    Nicole D. LaDue

  2. Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Thomas F. Shipley

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  1. Nicole D. LaDue
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Correspondence to Nicole D. LaDue .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Departments of Biological Sciences and Science Education, California State University, Chico, CA, USA

    Joel J. Mintzes

  2. Science Learning Associates, Wrightsville Beach, NC, USA

    Joel J. Mintzes

  3. Department of Biological Sciences and Center for STEM Education, California State University, Fresno, CA, USA

    Emily M. Walter

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LaDue, N.D., Shipley, T.F. (2020). Click-on-Diagram Questions: Using Clickers to Engage Students in Visual-Spatial Reasoning. In: Mintzes, J.J., Walter, E.M. (eds) Active Learning in College Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33600-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33600-4_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-33599-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-33600-4

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