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

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.