This project continues efforts to expand understanding of effective instructor to student and student peer to peer discourse in large lecture-style survey science classes using Pocket PCs and laptops. This is being done by conducting applied experiments in two different undergraduate courses in two institutions with very different student demographic profiles. The courses are "extreme weather" and "computer-aided design." The experiments are measuring the effect of varying intensities of peer to peer and instructor to peer interactions during class time, and also of different degrees of requiring students to engage in meta-cognitive exercises related to their learning outcomes. This has broad implications for improving the effectiveness of instructor use of personal response systems. The planned experiments are state of the art and build on a solid base of prior research.
