Student perception on a student response system formed by combining mobile phone and a polling website

INTRODUCTIONTo achieve effective and efficient learning, student engagement is essential, but not easy to achieve (Micheletto, 2011; Wang, Shen, Novak, & Pan, 2009). In a classroom where the majority of the students are Chinese, the lack of student engagement is often an obstacle to achieving the learning outcomes (Wang et al., 2009). As digital technology continues to improve and become more economically viable to schools, many researches have been done to exploit technology to increase the student engagement (Hwang, Wu, Tseng, & Huang, 2011; Jungsun & Kizildag, 2011; Liu & Chen, 2015). Recently, many researches have focused on the use of SRS (Student Response Systems) in which the teacher can gather and summarise answers from students inside the classroom immediately (Carnaghan, Edmonds, Lechner, & Olds, 2011; Seamus McLoone, Villing, & O'Keeffe, 2015; Monk, Campbell, & Smala, 2013; Valle & Douglass, 2014). In a traditional SRS, the students use a small portal device, called a clicker, to choose their answers to questions. Then some proprietary software with summarise the responses from the students and display them on screen (Williams & Boyle, 2008).Many studies revealed that SRS are effective increasing student engaging and active learning (Cain, Black, & Rohr, 2009; Lindquist et al., 2007; Park, Nam, & Cha, 2012; Sad & Goktas, 2014). They are especially useful in creating a more engaging environment in a large lecture hall. The main benefit of using an SRS is that students are not afraid to answer questions because students can only see the statistics of the different answers, but not the individuals who gave the answers. However, using clickers means the school or the students have to purchase the hardware and software (Monk et al., 2013). Also, the clickers are usually small numeric keypads that have limited text entry capabilities. With the widespread use of smart mobile phones, it is possible to replace the clickers with mobile phones, and the proprietary software with commercially available polling website. The resulting system can be called a "mobile phone based SRS".If the mobile phone based SRS is technically feasible in a school and if students have positive perceptions of using such a system, then teachers can use it in class to increase student engagement and to identify individual students who are underperforming. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to perform a pilot study at a particular school, and then survey student perceptions to provide a reference to teachers at the same school for their decisions to use the system or not. The rest of this article is structured as follows. It starts with by reviewing the advantages mobile phones over the traditional methods of getting student feedback in the classroom. Then it reports the study that using an SRS that was created by combining a polling website with mobile phones of the students. Finally, it shows the results of a survey about the student's perception of the use of SRS. Lastly, some suggestions for future research in this area of mobile learning are suggested.MOBILE PHONES BASED SRS VERSUS TRADITIONAL QUESTIONING METHODSIn the tradition classroom where no technology is used, the teacher cannot get real-time feedback from all the students in the classroom. Typically, the teacher will ask some questions and request students to answer them verbally or raise their hands to choose their answers. Alternatively, the teacher may ask students to write down their answers on pieces of paper. These traditional methods have been used over a long period of time and can be used across many disciplines. Since no technology is involved, there is no computer knowledge or equipment requirement. However, this traditional method has some shortcomings that greatly reduce its effectiveness, especially in large lecture theatres.When the teacher wants to get qualitative answers from students, they would invite students to answer open-ended questions verbally. …