Student Response Times to In-Class Thermodynamics Concept Questions: A Window into Students' Thinking Processes.

In this study, we measured chemical engineering students' response times to multiple choice thermodynamics concept questions while the students were engaged in technology-facilitated active learning in class. We examine response time differences for over 12,000 responses: between correct and incorrect answers, with and without written explanations to justify the answers, and as a function of question difficulty. For students who wrote a written explanation, we also investigated the length of explanation. We are interested in both implementation issues for the practitioner and in contributing to the extant understanding of the ways in which these type of question influence student thinking processes. Our findings show that students who answer correctly take less time to answer easy questions than those who answer incorrectly, but more time for more difficult questions. Response times are correlated with question difficulty when the correct answer is chosen, but not for incorrect answers. Moreover, for easy questions, explanations that are correct are likely to contain more words whereas for more difficult questions explanations associated with incorrect answers contain more words. When accounting for difficulty, it takes students about 100 seconds longer to provide a written explanation justifying their answer choice. However, differences in response data suggest that students who justify their answers in writing also more commonly activate thinking processes that focus on domain-specific knowledge. When possible, we advocate using written explanations in conjunction with multiple-choice concept questions during active learning in class, arguing that the short additional time needed to allow students to type explanations activates more deliberate thinking processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]