Insights on Student Learning from Live Classroom Polls: More Than Right or Wrong

Abstract

A live classroom poll is usually read through its answer key, as a count of participation and correctness. Yet the same record holds more before any key is fixed, namely who answers early and how the class divides across the options. Whether these key-free signals are stable, and what they reveal, has not been examined at the scale of a real course. We study them in a live deployment of 340,668 submissions across 603 polls in 47 sessions from roughly 2,400 learners, reading each poll for a learner's response order and for how much the class divides. A single further step brings in the author-designated key, on items with a settled answer, to interpret the divided ones. A learner's response order is a stable individual signature. It reproduces at a corrected split-half reliability of 0.92, holds at 0.87 within single sessions, and is unrelated to whether the learner is correct. Read without a key, about one poll in five does not reach a clear majority, and division marks the questions that split the class. On the settled-answer items the majority is itself wrong on 49 of 358. The key-free measure flags most of these, though division alone does not separate a collectively wrong answer from a merely hard one. The two readings are largely independent, meeting at one point where early responders anticipate the eventual majority only on questions the class has nearly settled. Together they map the learners and questions of a session without a key.