Leveraging an Audience Response System for Student Learning and Engagement: Competitive Team Activities in the Classroom with Undergraduate Medical Students

With ever expanding volumes of content deemed critical, but limited curriculum time, medical students are responsible for much of the learning process outside of the classroom. Accordingly, face-to-face time must be optimized for efficiency and value. Leveraging an audience response system (ARS) to deliver multiple-choice questions to students in a competitive team environment may be an effective way to facilitate engagement, motivation, active learning, higher-order thinking and problem solving, peer scaffolding, and formative assessment. This paper describes the use of “compete” functions available in an ARS to deliver a competitive team activity to undergraduate medical students in a large classroom setting. © 2016, International Association of Medical Science Educators.