Introduction

There are an increasing number of classroom voting question sets already available. This paper is a guide on how to utilize existing questions, how to write a few new questions and how to put them to use during a lesson. The example lesson “New Functions fromOld” is from the third day of class of review for a DifferentialCalculus course. This lesson was used in two different sections of the course, each taught during a 50-minute period. Lesson goals: recognizing even and odd functions; identifying invertible functions; finding the equation for the inverse of an invertible function; composing functions, and graphing vertical and horizontal shifts and stretches, reflections about x- and y-axis and across the line y = x. The functions that have been studied so far are lines and exponentials but the students should also be familiar with quadratic, cubic and trigonometric functions through prerequisite courses.

Organization and preparation

For the following lesson example, I used the voting questions as a follow up for each portion of the traditional lecture instruction. The lesson plan was used on the same day for both a morning and an afternoon section of Differential Calculus. My notes on the lesson reflect this tendency to lecture then vote in small time increments, which keeps the class at a comfortable pace. If the voting questions are used at the end of class as a kind of catch all, it is often the case that time is an issue and it ends up that no voting questions are used instead of at least a few of them sprinkled throughout the lesson.