Karen Supan is a Professor of Engineering at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. During the first 5-minutes of class, she has students answer a few multiple-choice questions on their phones or other personal devices, reviewing the previous day’s material. Supan has successfully implemented this teaching strategy in engineering courses, but the technique can easily be transferred to mathematics courses or other disciplines. The warm-up questions Supan uses are always related to the previous day’s class notes, which students are allowed to access while answering the questions. After a few minutes to respond, the class reviews the answers together and Supan can correct any misunderstandings with the content before moving forward.
Over the past couple of years, more students have had poor attendance and so warm-up questions are a way to make student in-class time feel more necessary through formative assessment and low-stakes opportunities to practice with content. This provides a good review of the previous days’ notes and is a way to emphasize important topics from the previous lecture, while also checking student comprehension of the material. Across one semester, Supan asked students 42 daily questions (this is on average 3 questions per class meeting, excluding the first class and exam days). Students received points for completing the warm-up in person in class, not for getting correct answers. The highest student score across all daily questions was 100%, lowest was 38%, with an average class score of 88% completeness on the daily questions. 17 out of 26 students received an A overall in this grade category, and got regular practice reviewing course material in a multiple-choice format.
Supan cautions that if points awarded in this grade category are intended to promote class attendance, it would be best to explicitly state that the warm-up is to be completed in class. Instructors might also want to track student attendance in a separate way in case students are emailing an absent student the day’s warm-up link to complete outside of class. Instructors can be transparent about how completing the warm-up outside of class does still provide practice with course material, while reminding students of the benefits of being in class together with peers and their instructor in real time.
Digital Resources
Microsoft Forms
This teaching practice evolved from a daily question posed to students on a power-point slide at the beginning of class to a Microsoft Form with a couple of questions that students answer individually. Supan posts a QR code about 5 minutes before class starts, which students scan when entering the classroom, opening up the form on their phone or iPad. Supan asks only multiple-choice questions and utilizes the graphs and summary analyses provided by Microsoft Forms to quickly see how well students are doing. She can then easily focus on reviewing the most problematic question(s) with the class before moving forward with a new lesson. The entire warm-up and review is completed within the first 5 minutes of class. This is a strategy that can work equally well in in person and synchronous online courses to begin a class session.
Digital Enablement
Anecdotally, Supan thinks that consistent use of warm-up questions to start class really helps students focus in on important topics from previous lectures and have practice with the format and style of multiple-choice questions on exams. In addition to free response questions, Supan’s exams include a section of multiple-choice questions which are the same or similar to those used as warm-ups.
“Moving this to be a digital tool allowed for me to hear from all of the students not just the students who feel comfortable speaking aloud in class,” Supan says. Overall, the use of an online tool has helped encourage class attendance and frequent review of the material for students without increasing the grading burden for Supan.