Mentimeter: engaging students with an easy-to-use audience response system
Mentimeter: engaging students with an easy-to-use audience response system
Amanda Millmore
What is the idea?
Finding ways to engage large lecture cohorts and small group tutorials alike and make teaching more interactive is never easy. Using the app Mentimeter, where students answer questions on their own devices, interacting anonymously with questions posed by the teacher, increases inclusivity, improves student-staff dialogue and makes the experience more enjoyable for all (Mayhew et al., 2020). The dynamic visuals encourage students to interact and break down barriers enabling students to get involved. It benefits the teacher as they can check student knowledge and adapt teaching flexibly in response to student input, and improves student engagement and enjoyment of the classes. This can benefit students at any level of learning.
Why this idea?
With many teachers having to move into a blended learning sphere, which is not everyone’s natural environment, some aspects of teaching have become increasingly passive and asynchronous, with pre-recorded lectures and materials and dialogue between teacher and students offered asynchronously via discussion boards, Padlets and online forums. Whilst these have their place in creating an online community (McDaniels et al., 2016), they can constrain the discussion (Gao et al., 2013) and can lack a feeling of dynamic dialogue. Mentimeter is an easy to use and helpful application to foster better engagement with students, whether students are physically in the same space in a face-to-face classroom, or studying online and you are seeking to interact in an online classroom; it can be used asynchronously but the focus here is on its use in synchronous settings.
Research has shown significantly increased satisfaction and enjoyment from students using Mentimeter, as well as enhanced student attention (Mayhew et al., 2020). Student feedback emphasised that it was “…fun and energising – actually interacting with lecturers rather than just sitting and listening makes it easier to pay attention…” (Mayhew et al., 2020, p. 7).
The anonymity encourages participation (Heaslip et al., 2014), although may at times require more teacher monitoring to remove any inappropriate comments in free text tasks. Moreover, the dialogic approach supports students’ learning and understanding of a topic (Alexander, 2017), with enhanced opportunities for students to check their knowledge or gain reassurance of their level of understanding. It does require the teacher to surrender some control of the class, but the corollary of that is increased engagement. There is an increased investment of time preparing a session to incorporate Mentimeter in teaching, but it reaps rewards in the benefits to the class.
How could others implement this idea?
Before the session – Step 1:
The teacher prepares slides in advance of the class using pre-set types of question (multiple choice, scoring, scales and ranking exercises, open-ended Q&A style answers a