How can hands up vs no hands up question techniques help attainment in class?
I was a shy individual in my early years in high school who didn’t enjoy raising my hand in classroom discussions when I was at school.
As a teacher I realised that within some of my own lessons there are certain pupils who participate more, raising hands and suggesting more answers to questions. My S3 class were particularly divided in this area where some pupils do not contribute in classroom discussions and then struggle with activities in class and assessments.
I wanted to study the impact this may or may not have upon their learning.
According to Wiliam (2014), pupils who actively contribute in the classroom become 'smarter'. They learn more through participation whereas those who do not lose the chance to gain new knowledge. This is referred to by Stanovich (1986) in his research as the educational 'Matthew Effect'.
It was suggested that random picking (cold calling) is used, however the main issue with this method is that often asking at random and picking on pupils who answer less often may result in a less than satisfactory response and lead the teacher to ask a pupil who they know will give a much better answer.
Targeted questioning where the teacher selects the pupil they expect to give the best response also is flawed in that only a select few who will most likely answer correctly get asked the question.
Hands down techniques differ from hands up questioning by involving the whole class in the answering part of the questioning, and encourage everyone to be involved at all stages of the process.
There are several hands down answering techniques including:
- Use of whiteboards/show me boards
- Use of computers (using Microsoft Word to answer)
- Multiple choice/ABCD cards
- Post-it notes
- Cold calling (letting pupils think for a short period of time then randomly selecting someone to answer)
Each of these has its own advantages but all of them encourage full classroom engagement.
Preparation for carrying out the experiment
Questioning should be indirect and class wide, asking questions that make pupils think rather than getting a one word answer
Pupils performance should be compared based on their performance on the main tasks and how they performed in classroom discussion
The experiment would be carried out with S3 first then two S1 classes back to back to find if there was any variance in levels. I also chose two different levels of classes for S1, one which was high-ability and one which is quiet and mixed ability.
Pupils were assigned a number from 1 to 20.
How the experiment was carried out
For the first 3 questions (E1, E2, E3) pupils were asked to raise their hands if they knew the answer. I then got the answer from one pupil, and asked the others if that was their answer too. Each pupil who gave that answer would get 1 tick next to their number.
For the second 3 questions (E4, E5, E6), pupils had a set of whiteboards and wrote their answers. 1 tick for each correct answer next to their number.
For S1 it was changed slightly:
For the first 2 questions (E1, E2) pupils were asked to raise their hands if they knew the answer. I then got the answer from one pupil, and asked the others if that was their answer too. Each pupil who gave that answer would get 1 tick next to their number.
For the second 2 questions (E3, E4), pupils answered the question on Microsoft Word on their computers and wrote their answers. 1 tick for each correct answer next to their number. More pupils answered correctly here.
How this experiment was measured
To compare results, tasks 1 and 2 were marked and given a percentage. That percentage was then compared and the difference was calculated between them.
If the difference between task 2 and task 1 was more than 15% then the pupil had improved on task 2. If the difference was more than -15% the pupil had not improved. Otherwise it was the same.
This was then compared to how they performed with the hands up in part 1, often finding that those who didn’t contribute with the hands up session performed poorly in task 1.
Finally, the number of questions answered correctly in both the hands up and hands down sessions were compared against the improvement, if they were answering in these sessions and answering well in the tasks then the theory was correct.
The lesson : S3
S3s were learning how to transform binary to decimal and decimal to binary. This seemed like the perfect lesson to carry out the experiment.
For E1 to E3, pupils were answering binary to decimal questions. They completed a worksheet straight after this questioning session was finished.
For E4 to E6, pupils were answering decimal to binary questions, often seen as the harder to understand part of binary. Pupils then completed a worksheet based on this.
The first chart is looking at is the number of correct answers per question asked. 2 questions were asked per session and this shows the correct number of answers in both the hands up session and the hands down session.
The second chart shows the number of pupils who did better in task 2. It shows clearly that the number of pupils performing better in task 2 has increased.
Comparing both charts gives us the result that was original expected - the hands down/whiteboard approach gave more correct answers and as a result ended up with better classroom performance.
The lesson : S1
S1s were working on cyber security. It seemed like a good topic to perform the experiment on because not only was it very clear-cut on the marking but it was a good lesson for questioning pupils.
4 questions were asked, and pupils received 1 mark for a correct answer.
Two S1 classes were asked and both had very different levels of ability.
The first chart is looking at is the number of correct answers per question asked. 2 questions were asked per session and this shows the correct number of answers in both the hands up session and the hands down session.
This chart shows the number of pupils who did better in task 2. It shows clearly that the number of pupils performing better in task 2 has marginally increased.
S1 did indicate a slight improvement within the hands down session, with the green bar showing how many pupils improved on task 2.
Results and findings
The experiment definitely shows that the number of pupils contributing within a hands up versus hands down situation such as whiteboards has improved pupil participation. A side-effect of this research experiment was that pupils within all classes there were fewer requests for the teacher to repeat instructions or assist pupils with questions and classroom understanding appeared to be higher within the hands down part of the experiment (this was noticeable but has not been scientifically tested since it was not the purpose of this experiment).
The results show that the increase in pupils’ academic performance does improve, marginally overall, when given a hands down questioning activity compared with one in which pupils provide answers by raising their hands.
How I will use this research
Whilst the research here does not show a huge improvement in all areas and levels, it shows that some pupils have definitely benefited from the improved classroom engagement that would otherwise have struggled due to the hands down techniques implemented.
I currently use hands down techniques in the majority of my classes ranging from typing the answers individually and then asking the class to show their answers at the same time, or using whiteboards to write their answers but I feel that now that I can see a possible benefit to this, I would aspire to do it more often.
Conclusion
I feel that the research carried out was inconclusive and although it shows a glimmer of hope for the improvement of academic performance of pupils, I believe it would need to be carried out again to further understand the impact.
Further, it was noticeable during the task based on the hands down session, that pupils asked for help less, and there were fewer requests for the teacher to repeat something from the lesson so that a pupil could get a better understanding. This is an area I would personally like to explore and research further into.
