Cultivating a questioning mind: Student-led question composition in large courses

Asking a good question is not a trivial task. It requires deep comprehension and concept integration. To facilitate critical thinking and mastering of foundational concepts in a large Genetics course (~1200 students) at the second-year undergraduate level, we decided to actively engage students in question creation. We used “Quizzical”, an online platform developed by Prof. Dan Riggs (Riggs et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-09-0189). Via this platform, students are tasked with the creation of multiple-choice questions. For each of the suggested answer choices, students are required to provide a comprehensive justification. This includes justification for the correct answer as well as for each of the distractors. An added advantage of the platform is the generation of student-authored quiz banks that can be used for practice and participation marks. Since the questions are created by multiple authors, they included diverse point of views, which we learned the students greatly appreciated. To foster metacognition and encourage a shift from perceiving learning as memorization of information, students were encouraged to create application-based questions. Higher grades were granted to questions that creatively integrated multiple concepts or required knowledge application.In order to inform our teaching practices, pilot studies were conducted in Fall 2021 and Summer 2022, where students were asked to complete an anonymous survey regarding their experiences with Quizzical, and the feedback that we received was positive overall. We will discuss the learning outcomes achieved by engaging the students in question creation, and will share quantitative and formative feedback received from our students.This research was approved by our institutional research ethics board.