Providing Students with Choices
Current research supports the notion that having personal choices can have positive and motivational affects on individuals. This is true as well when students, either individually or as a group, are allowed to make choices about what and how they will learn in a particular course.
Instructors must often cover specific content in a set amount of time, but they may be able to provide students with limited choices. Providing but also limiting options also may decrease the likelihood of overwhelming students who are not familiar with the subject area of a course and who would have difficulty generating topic and method ideas on their own.
Activities
Below are a few examples of ways instructors can allow students to make choices in the classroom.
- Conduct a poll to determine which two of six topics students will study in depth.
- Conduct a poll to gather feedback from students about the status of an assignment or pacing of the course. Choices could include "ready to move on," "need another day," or "need help."
- Let students select project or presentation topics from a list of options. They also can form groups based on their areas of interest.
Teaching Tips
Although choices in general are good, some research suggests that you can have too much of a good thing. Below are a few tips about providing students with choices.
- Limit the options to six or less (too many can be confusing or overwhelming).
- If a topic is very important, do not allow students a choice.
- Create options that benefit student(s) but are not difficult for the instructor to manage.
Technologies
Instructors can use the Moodle course management system's Choice activity to present students with multiple choice options. The answers are not graded but are recorded for the instructor to see. The instructor may enable the students to see the results either before or after they make their choices and also may place a limit on the number of times an option can be chosen.
Examples
We created the example scenarios below to illustrate how instructors might allow students to make choices about assignment topics.
Figure 1: A portion of a Moodle "Adding a new Choice" settings page. See the full excerpt.
Figure 2: A portion of a Moodle "Adding a new Choice" settings page. See the full excerpt.
Figure 3: A portion of a Moodle Choice results page. See the full page.
Adding a New Choice Activity
An instructor could set up a Choice activity in Moodle by following these steps:
- Turn the editing mode to "On."
- Select a Choice activity under the "Add Activity" drop-down list in your course site.
- This will bring you to the "Adding a new Choice" settings page. To get an explanation of various options, select the question mark icon next to the question.
Choosing Group Presentation Topics
An instructor could enable students to choose the topic of an assignment using the Moodle Choice activity. For example: instructor X is teaching a music history course at the 3000-level. In his syllabus, he has scheduled students to give group presentations during week 10 about lesser-known composers of the classical era. He wants the students to form groups by individually selecting which of six composers are most appealing to them. He has chosen these composers because they made important contributions but were not included in the text book. He decides to use the Moodle Choice activity because it is easy to use and won't take any valuable class time. To set up this activity, he follows these steps:
- Choose the appropriate settings on the Moodle "Adding a new Choice" settings page (see the settings instructor X chose in Figures 1 and 2).
- With these settings each student can select one of six options. After making a choice, each student sees the "full results," including the names of the other students and their choices (see Figure 3).
Related Resources
- For more information about how to use the Moodle Choice activity, see http://docs.moodle.org/en/Choice_module. This page also contains a link to a Moodle book chapter on glossaries.
- See Forum postings by Moodle users about the Moodle Choice activity at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=119.
- Read about experiments that showed people are more likely to make purchases or complete optional class assignments when presented with fewer choices: Iyengar, Sheena S., and Mark R. Lepper. "When Choice is Demotivating Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 6 (December 2000): 995–1006. http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/79/6/995.html.
