Do Mathematics Interactive Classrooms Help Academics Engage Learners (MICHAEL)?

In recent editions of this newsletter, Ray Inverno (2003) and Ernst Wit (2003) have described the benefits of using the PRS Personal Response System or “zappers” in mathematics teaching. PRS has been well used at Portsmouth for over 5 years (McCabe, Heal and White, 2001) in several subject areas, including mathematics, and prior to that a more expensive system called Teamworker (Irving, 2000) was used. In fact, the PRS system is just one of several “group response systems”, which are themselves a subset of the more powerful “classroom communications systems”. Michael McCabe has been exploring the use of these interactive classrooms in his National Teaching Fellowship project LOLA (Live and On-Line Assessment). The following light-hearted (and partly true!) conversation attempts to explain how this work has evolved…