Giving Sport and Exercise student a digital voice: Using the Socrative ‘Exit-Ticket’ to promote collaborative learning

Background A report published by BASES (2021) investigating the impact of remote learning on Sport and Exercise student learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, identified a lack of interaction as a barrier to student engagement. This follows suggestions that students can be uncomfortable with verbal interaction in on-line sessions (Blackburn and Stroud, 2015), which may result in the loss of a collaborative learning experience. The Socrative app is part of the University’s FFL tool-kit, and has potential to promote student voice, and enhance engagement. The ‘exit ticket’ function in particular may be useful (Zou and Lambert, 2017) to gauge student understanding of a topic, and for students to provide feedback that can feed-forward into subsequent teaching sessions. This study explored the feasibility of the Socrative ‘Exit-ticket’ function to promote collaborative learning and student engagement. Approach The use of the Socrative ‘Exit-Ticket’ function was trialled with 63 BSc Sport and Exercise Science students, who completed the ‘Exit Ticket’ weekly after synchronous on-line sessions for 6-weeks. The students’ input was considered weekly to feed-forward into the following taught session, with a view to providing a collaborative experience for the students. To assess the effectiveness of the process, students were required to complete a short-survey after the 6-week period. Outcomes The process, integrated during Semester 2 is ongoing, but early indications suggest that students appreciate the opportunity to provide feedback, with >70% of students that attend the sessions providing feedback. The purpose of this study was to ensure that the process can be implemented effectively within the content of a module, and there may be potential to follow-up with a larger scale parallel groups study whereby we can assess the efficacy of using the ‘exit-ticket’ feature on indicators of student engagement. We will share our experiences and key learning from this study within this presentation.