Benefits of Employing a Personal Response System in a Decision Analysis Course

Introduction Personal Response Systems (PRS) are technologies that enable students to instantly respond to posed questions using a computer or some end user device. PRS is one of several terms used to describe technologies for collecting audience responses. Some of the other terms in use are clickers, polling systems, electronic voting systems, and group/ audience/class response systems. A PRS can receive participants' responses and can provide a representation (or several) of the collected data. Instructors in variety of disciplines are increasingly using PRS to increase participation, engagement and learning (See for example, Beatty & Gerace, 2009; Mareno, Bremner, & Emerson, 2010). The use of such systems for education requires respective instructional design regarding the choice and phrasing of the questions, the timing, the frequencies, the representation and presentation of the collected data, further adaptation of instructional interventions according to the collected data, and more. In line with the assumption that the employment of a PRS should reflect the course goals (Or Bach, 2014), this paper focuses on the employment of a PRS in a Decision Analysis course for Management Information Systems (MIS) students. Along with the use of multiple choice questions which enable immediate representation of the responses for a follow-up discussion, we incorporated questions that require free text responses. This additional style of using the PRS enables insights into students' conceptions and misconceptions. The respected analysis can then be presented for triggering reflection processes and thus refining students' understanding. Courses dealing with decision analysis can have different flavors. Some courses emphasize a descriptive view of human decision making behavior, while others emphasize mathematical modeling. Our course deals mainly with quantitative methods for decision analysis and with decision analysis under uncertainty. The course presents also some psychological aspects of probabilistic thinking and human decision making in order to make students aware of respective known biases. Because the course tends to be technical and involves mathematical procedures, it seemed important to keep the focus on modeling approaches, concepts, context of use, etc. The idea was not to have the students "sink" in the computations, but see the purpose and potential use of the different techniques. We tried also to utilize the course for developing and exercising problem solving skills along with some soft non-technical skills that are considered important for MIS graduates (Lavy & Yadin, 2013). This course seemed a good opportunity for developing such skills in a context of business-like problems that have real-life flavor including uncertainty, additional required data, need for explicit explanation of the rationale for the decision, etc. The way the course was designed seemed a good context for exercising rigor, logical and resourceful thinking; and for exercising the generation and phrasing of convincing and understandable explanations for the decision making process and result. These communication skills are important for MIS graduates and are required for team work as well as for effective user-centered design. A course on decision analysis is also a context for developing and exercising modeling skills. Modeling is an essential capability for MIS graduates whether as part of a programming task, for modeling a business problem or process, and for modelling additional tasks required within the development process of an information system. The use of decision trees is also an opportunity to show and discuss with the students the power of diagramatic representations for modeling (Bredeweg & Forbus, 2003), for decision making (Lurie & Mason, 2007), and for problem solving (Larkin & Simon, 1987; Moreno, Ozogul, & Reisslein, 2011). In our course we tried to use or add diagrammatic representations, on top of the required use of decision trees, whenever it was appropriate. …