Real-time classroom polls show varied question purposes and engagement levels
Characterizing Questioning Patterns and Student Engagement Through Contextual Analysis of Real-Time Classroom Interactions
Human-Computer InteractionArtificial IntelligenceComputers and Society
Summary
Classroom polling often reports only right or wrong answers, missing how questions affect learning during a lecture. The authors studied over 600 polling questions taken during 47 live classes, showing that understanding the context of questions reveals why they are asked. Most questions tested simple knowledge and served seven different teaching purposes. Students often answered correctly, but sometimes many agreed on wrong answers. Also, students could not accurately judge their own learning or the difficulty of questions.
What this means in practice
- •For online course designers: Use contextual analysis of polling questions to design better real-time assessments that clarify student understanding and guide teaching strategies.
- •For learning analytics teams: Incorporate lecture context into automated engagement and correctness metrics for more nuanced monitoring of student responses during live sessions.
Authors
Rohit Sharma, Pavani Ayinampudi, Aditya B. M. V., Jinal Gupta, Prakash Hegade, Sakshi Sharma, Meenakshi V, SRS Iyengar
Abstract
Real-time classroom polling is now routine, yet the data it produces is usually read narrowly, as a correctness score or a headcount. Such readings say little about what a poll is doing within a lecture or how it shapes engagement. This is particularly relevant for short-response formats such as True/False, where the same question format can be used to test recall, check comprehension, or direct students' attention to a deliberately misleading statement. This study asks whether a poll's answer and instructional function can be determined by reading it against its lecture transcript, what cognitive levels of Bloom's taxonomy and instructional-function clusters the corpus contains, and how student engagement relates to answering correctly. We analyse a naturalistic corpus of 47 live sessions over 39 days, comprising 604 poll questions and 340,668 responses from 2,807 learners, most items True/False, read against time-aligned lecture transcripts and attendance. Reading each poll in context proves essential: the answer to 89% of polls is locatable in the lecture, and a recurring attention-checking device is visible only through context. Questioning is overwhelmingly lower-order and falls into seven instructional functions, and a poll's response follows its function rather than its wording. Engagement is broad but concentrated, and the class majority answers correctly 88.5% of the time, though a small set of high-consensus yet incorrect answers cannot be detected by agreement alone. An independent survey of 579 students agrees on what the polls are and on their participation, but reveals a gap between perception and reality: students cannot judge their own correctness, and the polls they find hardest are not those they answer worst.