Gauging students' understanding through interactive lectures

The Personal Response System (PRS) enables audience responses to multiple choice questions to be collected quickly, and for a summary of all the answers to be displayed to the whole group immediately, making it a useful tool for promoting classroom discussion. This paper describes its use as a means for assessing students' understanding of previously learned material, in the context of two consecutive database modules. The PRS was used in the areas of Entity-Relationship diagrams, Relational Algebra, and SQL, and proved to be useful in assessing students' current level of understanding.