Designing questions for digital polling

What is the purpose for your digital polling

Digital polling can be applied to the teaching and learning space for a number of reasons including, but not limited to: increase student engagement and participation; increase student feedback around threshold concepts so teachers can adapt content; rapid feedback loops for the teacher and learner through knowledge self-checks; reinforce threshold concepts; create a sense of cohort and connection between campus and cloud-based students; and alignment of digital polling questions to content.

Before implementing Mentimeter in your teaching practice it is important to articulate why you are using digital polling and what you want to achieve by using it. This will enable you to review your content and determine where to add digital polling accordingly. Please note: it is not expected that you get it right the first time however review how it has worked and iterate your design through feedback for the following weeks’ content and unit.

To get ideas of the different question types, refer to the question types further down the page.

Tips and tricks to get started

In our research of academics using digital polling in their units, it was found there were some simple tips and tricks to get started:

Do not ‘overuse’ the digital polling tool; find a happy medium for your unit otherwise it can ‘hijack’ the class and lead to reduced engagement.
When using digital polling, make sure students see the impact as this will increase engagement. For example, if you pose a question and the majority of students get it incorrect, then it is important that you spend time on why that answer was incorrect. In doing so, you are demonstrating that the students’ response will generate an impact (in this instance an explanation of why it was incorrect) and therefore they will be more likely to participate in future polls.
Do not underestimate the time it takes to respond to the polls; so start off small and iterate the design as you progress.
To design polls that aren’t generic but are aligned to the content can be time consuming. So, to get started you can use the questions from a text book that you may be aligning your teaching with. Remember, this is an iterative process, so you can review this over time.
Don’t use the same question types; experiment with different question types to get feedback from the students.

When would I use Mentimeter?

To demonstrate different ways in which digital polling can be implemented in the teaching and learning space to achieve different pedagogical outcomes. It is important to experiment with different question types depending on what you like to achieve.

There are a number of different question types that you can develop, for support in writing the following please visit:

For Multiple choice questions, download Guide to writing Multiple Choice Questions (PDF, 106kb).
For new ideas refer to the inspiration tab in Mentimeter and they will explore how you can use different question types.
We will be sharing authentic teaching and learning examples in due course; if you would like to showcase what you are doing please contact joan.sutherland@deakin.edu.au.

Use this to support you in getting started developing your digital polling questions.