Top Hat is an online student response system with many features that can boost both face-to-face and virtual interactions between students and the instructor. Student response systems (SRS) can promote active learning, allowing the physical classroom to become a collaborative space. Instructors ask questions via the Top Hat software platform and students respond using their personal devices.The central tenet of active learning is that practice matters, and that classroom time is better spent giving students opportunities to work with concepts over and over, in a variety of ways, and with opportunities for immediate feedback so that knowledge can take hold in their own minds. (Preville 2018)
The instructor can display the results collected, so the class can see a visual representation of all student responses to the question. Top Hat is available at no cost to all IU faculty, staff, and students and can be easily integrated into Canvas.
What Can I Do with It?
Our Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning describes a few of Top Hat’s commonly used functions:
Take Attendance | Top Hat SRS now features secure attendance technology that includes location information from students’ phones in recording class attendance data. Learn more about using Top Hat for accurate attendance and class participation at IUB.
Student Engagement | SRS can be used to increase student engagement during class, to assess student preparation and learning, and to seek students’ opinions and attitudes.
Peer Instruction | SRS have been shown to be especially useful for peer instruction, in which students are presented with a thought-provoking question and allowed to submit an individual answer. After the results are displayed, students discuss their answers and reasoning in pairs or small groups.
Low Stakes Assessments | SRS can be associated with an individual student, therefore can use utilized to administer low-stakes assessments.
Additionally, please consider the following before working with Top Hat or any SRS – (Adapted from University of Iowa)
Determine if student response systems are right for your teaching style:
- Is your main reason for using Top Hat to enhance interactive teaching and learning?
- Are you able to shift discussion based on the students’ responses to questions?
- Are you prepared to devote more class time than usual to questions using the student response system?
Communicate with your students
- Include Top Hat information in your syllabus so your students know how to access their account.
- Share your reasons for using Top Hat to promote engagement in the course.
Carefully select questions and answer choices:
Consider the following questions when drafting your questions:
- What student learning goals do I have for the question?
- What do I hope to learn about my students by asking this question?
- What will my students learn about each other when they see the results of this question?
- How might this question be used to engage students with course content in small-group or class-wide discussions?
- What distribution of responses do I expect to see from my students?
- What might I do if the actual distribution turns out very differently than what I expected?
As always, please let me know how I can help support your teaching needs.
Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
CITL – STEM Reads: Mindful Reading Practices for Transfer
When: Friday, September 9, 2022 11 a.m. – 12 noon EDT
Are you interested in helping your students read more mindfully, carefully, and with deeper engagement? Join us for this one-hour session where we will discuss:
- Categorizing and understanding the type of reading in your STEM class and discipline
- Various types of reading goals for your STEM students & ways to communicate your goals for reading
- Methods for assisting students in parsing how to read materials for your class
- Integrating visual literacy into your course and asking students to translate between visual to written information, and vice versa
- Helping students transfer knowledge from reading to other class activities
We Robot 2022
When: September 14, 2022 – September 16, 2022
Hosted by the UW Tech Policy Lab
This interdisciplinary conference has brought together leading scholars and practitioners to discuss legal and policy questions relating to robots
Grace Hopper Celebration
When: September 16, 2022 – September 23, 2022
Join the largest gathering of women and non-binary technologists virtually at GHC 22! Come build your network meet technology leaders, grow your community, and expand your skills.
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