This quick "how to" guide covers the basics of using the Student Response System.
About the Student Response System
The Student Response Tool is a formative assessment tool that will allow you to embed quick, direct measures of learning into lectures, workshops, trainings, and other learning experiences. With the Student Response System, you can create a short quiz that students respond to on their mobile device, tablet, or laptop. Results are viewable instantly, allowing you to get a climate reading on how well students are learning, make adjustments to the content or teaching style of your lesson right away, provide students with feedback on their understanding, and offer an engaging opening for conversation. If you’ve ever led a learning experience and wondered if you’re getting through, the Student Response System is an opportunity to engage in formative assessment with easy-to-use technology.
Note: As outlined above, the SRS tool is intended for quick, on-the-spot data collection and review. For longer or more in-depth assessments, which may require more detailed analysis or comparison to past data, we recommend using our Baseline survey tools instead. Feel free to reach out to your Baseline Support Specialist with any questions about which tool is best for your assessment needs.
How It Works
Respondents can connect with your SRS session by visiting the URL srs.campuslabs.com (srs.campuslabs.ca for Canadian users). To connect, they’ll need to enter their name and your Connect ID number.
TIP: While the name fields are mandatory, they are not validated. If you would like student responses to remain anonymous, encourage students to enter a random letter in each field.
After they hit Connect, respondents will see a screen that says “Waiting for Question” until you start your poll.
TIP: Have students connect with SRS at the beginning of the learning experience and leave the browser open. As soon as you start your session, it will automatically begin for respondents already connected.
To access your SRS sessions, click on the Student Response button on your Baseline homepage.
Here, you’ll find all your SRS Sessions stored for reference. You can also find your Connect ID at the top of the page. This four-digit number is unique to you as a Baseline user and will not change. You will share it with respondents in order to connect them with any of your sessions.
TIP: Clicking once on your connect ID will reveal the URL respondents can use to connect with your session (srs.campuslabs.com or srs.campuslabs.ca)
Click Create a Session to create a new SRS session, and give it a title. Then click Add a Question to begin adding questions.
Insert single response (respondents can only select one answer choice), multiple select (respondents can select multiple answer choices), and open response (respondents enter up to 140 characters of open-ended text) questions one at a time, clicking Save for each one.
Note: Each quiz can have a maximum of fifteen (15) questions, and each single response or multiple select question can have a maximum of five (5) answer choices.
BEST PRACTICE: For multiple choice questions, you can add an exclusive answer choice by clicking on “Add Exclusive Answer” on the lower right-hand side of the question. Respondents will not be able to select an exclusive answer choice along with any others. This is good practice for “opt out” answer choices such as “Not applicable,” “Unsure,” “None of the above,” etc.
Click on the Settings gear in the top right-hand corner of your session to access settings. Choose to set your session as manual or self-paced before starting it. You control the output of each question in a manual session, while a self-paced session will allow students to take each question at their own pace. Other settings available here: Copy your quiz (great for quickly designing pre- and post-tests), Download an Excel spreadsheet of the results after administering, and Delete once you've reviewed the results and have no more need of the poll data.
BEST PRACTICE: Design a manual quiz to check in on understanding at pre-determined intervals in a learning experience. (Teach a chunk of material, check understanding by starting question 1, teach a chunk of material, check understanding by starting question 2, and so on.)
Once you’ve selected manual or self-paced in the settings, start your session at any time by clicking on the green Start button on the top right. This will appear at the top of your quiz in a self-paced setting and at the top of individual questions in a manual setting.
Once responses start coming in, you’ll be able to see answers live.
TIP: You control who can see the live data as it comes in. Sharing with students by displaying results on a projector can provide for an engaging dialogue opportunity. But you can also hide results from students by starting the SRS session on a separate device or turning off the projector while a quiz is in session.
Open-ended questions display as a word cloud. Keywords will be pulled from responses, with those words used most frequently displaying large and bold while those words used by fewer respondents show up small and lightly colored. Click on Generate Word Cloud as soon as a respondent has answered, and regenerate the word cloud as often as you would like.
You can tag individual questions by learning outcome or content for quick reference later. Click on the gift tag icon on the bottom left-hand side of any question to add a tag.
BEST PRACTICE: Use formative assessment results in a summative way with tags. At the end of the academic semester or year, you can review all those SRS questions you asked referring to a specific learning outcome and consider your results. How well did students perform on that learning outcome over time? How would you evaluate the various teaching methods you used this semester in terms of student learning? Which learning outcomes or content came easily, and which required additional review? The answers to these questions can help you better design the learning experience next semester or year.
If you have any further questions or need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact Campus Labs Support (you can also call 716-270-0000 Monday through Friday from 8:00am - 8:00pm EST).