Abstract
Classroom voting has become recognized as a powerful teaching technique in many courses including the calculus sequence (see e.g., [16, 59]). To build on this success, we have developed a library of over 300 classroom voting questions for differential equations with the primary goal of creating useful student discussions that will help teach this material (questions available at http://mathquest.carroll.edu).
After writing this collection, the next step was to test the questions by using them in our courses and collecting data on the voting results. The authors teach at a variety of different institutions, allowing us to see how well this teaching method worked with different groups of students. Cline, Zullo, and Parker teach at Carroll College in Montana, a small private liberal arts college with a traditional residential student body, and Harris teaches at a similar institution in Kentucky. Stewart teaches at Hood College in Maryland, a small private liberal arts college with a mix of residential and commuter students. Storm teaches at Adelphi, a university in New York with a strong regional draw that is primarily a commuting campus. George teaches at a public high school in Montana.
We found that classroom voting can be a very powerful way of revealing student misconceptions, so that they can be directly addressed. Rather than trying to anticipate the common difficulties that students have and designing a lesson to prevent students from making these errors, instead we found it more useful to ask questions which provoked the errors, helping students to confront these issues directly.