Attending a class where discussion is always dominated by the same handful of confident students can be annoying. It’s not great for learning, either: Participation is a form of practice, and hearing from a broad selection of classmates enhances everyone’s education.
For those reasons, many professors use “cold calling,” picking out a student who did not volunteer to contribute. Or they might use the related practice of “random calling,” found mostly in large STEM classes, in which instructors select a student or group to hear from using a random-number generator, names from a hat, or a similar tool.
Professors who use these techniques aim for an interactive classroom. Often, they are trying to hold students accountable, support an inclusive classroom, or both.
Yet even among professors committed to those goals, the idea of using cold or random calling is “divisive,” says one researcher who has studied it. Picture John Houseman as professor Kingsfield calling on law students in the 1973 film The Paper Chase: Cold calling can elicit a cold sweat. Anxiety can inhibit learning, and some professors worry about how the practice might especially affect students who are less likely to volunteer in the first place.
After a year when students had trouble getting to class, much less participating, lots of professors are looking for ways to make class time more engaging and worthwhile. What should they consider when weighing whether to add cold calling into the mix?
Public speaking provokes at least a bit of discomfort for many people: You’re the center of attention, and at risk of embarrassing yourself. The knowledge that at any moment you might be put on the spot could heighten and extend that feeling.
The discomfort of being called on in class, however, is not the same for everyone. Research suggests it’s worse for women, a finding that’s in keeping with other scholarship on shame. “Women are more concerned about making a fool of themselves in public,” says Judith E. Larkin, a professor emerita of psychology at Canisius College, who has studied the dynamic in a number of settings, including the classroom.
In one study, Larkin and her co-author, Harvey A. Pines, surveyed students about what they did to avoid being called on — things like avoiding eye contact with the professor and pretending to look for the answer in their notes. They found women made more use of tactics than men.
While Larkin is particularly worried about the potential harm cold calling might do to women, the paper notes that women aren’t the only ones trying to avoid it: More than 80 percent of the students reported engaging in at least one of the behaviors.
That not only signals students’ discomfort, Larkin says, but can also distract them from paying attention in class.
Like Larkin, Elise J. Dallimore wants to create a better classroom environment for women. But Dallimore’s research has reached the opposite conclusion about cold calling.
Dallimore, an associate professor of organizational studies in the communication-studies department with a joint appointment in the business school at Northeastern University, and her co-authors have studied cold calling by comparing students enrolled in sections of a required undergraduate accounting course where instructors used the approach to varying degrees.
They found voluntary student participation was higher in the sections where instructors did more cold calling. They also found that students’ self-reported comfort with speaking in class rose over time in the sections with lots of cold calling, but not the ones with less cold calling. That comfort, the authors think, comes from students’ increased preparation for and engagement in class — and the practice they’ve had speaking in it.
In another paper, the authors found that because cold calling increases the voluntary participation of women, it can lead to more equitable classroom discussions.
In her own classroom, Dallimore has found that cold calling encourages students to come to class prepared. “And as a result, they learn more,” she says. “Because then they can contribute, they can contribute at a higher level — we’re not starting our class at knowledge recall.”
Dallimore draws a distinction between the practice she studies and uses and random calling. She likes the term “tepid calling” because she calls on students strategically: sometimes picking volunteers and, when she calls on someone who hasn’t raised a hand, thinking about how best to draw them out.
This system, she emphasizes, democratizes discussion and empowers students. “Women find their voice. They find that their contributions are valued.”
How does that square with Larkin’s findings that women are particularly uncomfortable with cold calling? Tessa C. Andrews has some thoughts.
Andrews, an associate professor of genetics at the University of Georgia, is the researcher who described the idea of calling on nonvolunteers as “divisive.” She welcomes the growing tendency of professors, most of whom have little formal training in instruction, to seek out evidence-based teaching practices. Still, they should be careful not to take one study’s findings as their marching orders, she says. It’s important to know what, exactly, an instructor did that was effective — and in what context.
Andrews and an undergraduate student co-author interviewed biology instructors about how and why they use random calling, in an effort to better understand the technique. “Part of what we were trying to bring attention to is the existing literature tells us almost nothing,” she says. “I mean, we know it could be good, it could be bad.”
It’s not that the results researchers have found in their studies of cold or random calling are invalid, Andrews says — it’s that we don’t yet know exactly what aspect of the practice is driving those results.
A professor who uses random calling could take steps to try to mitigate student anxiety.
For instance: Many professors who use random calling select a particular group, rather than a particular student, in an effort to ease students’ anxiety. Some then layer in a process to select a particular student to speak for the group, to avoid it always being the same student. That makes intuitive sense, Andrew says — in fact, it’s the format she uses in her own classes. But there isn’t research to back it up.
Although she thinks random calling has benefits, Andrews also thinks that the concerns about student anxiety are legitimate. A professor who uses random calling could take steps to try to mitigate student anxiety, check in with students about how they are feeling — and also consider whether any anxiety students feel is, in fact, detrimental. A little nervousness might be fine; being unable to learn is not.
In their paper, Andrews and her co-author sought to understand instructors’ use of and thinking about random calling to begin to identify exactly which ingredients made it effective.
Based on their interviews, the authors hypothesize that the critical components of random calling could include, among others, explaining its use to students in advance and giving them time to talk to their classmates before calling on anyone. If future research can confirm what makes random calling effective, then professors who want to adopt the practice will have a way to check that they have all the key pieces in place.
But even then, two professors could follow the resulting evidence-based practice to a T and still get different results, because of the other things they’re doing in class.
That’s something that Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy emphasize when they describe their use of random calling in Inclusive Teaching: Strategies for Promoting Equity in the College Classroom (West Virginia University Press).
A technique like random calling exists within a broader classroom culture. It might be effective in her classroom, says Hogan in an interview, because of the work she’s already done to build trust with students and to emphasize that mistakes are a part of learning. That’s quite different from an instructor “robotically calling on groups,” she says, and responding to wrong answers less carefully.
“All of those things matter in terms of context,” says Hogan, associate dean of instructional innovation and a teaching professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “There’s a lot going on with how the instructor has set up the environment.”
This, says Sathy, might be the key to reconciling professors’ different perspectives on whether to engage nonvolunteers. “Of course, it feels awkward and uncomfortable,” says Sathy, associate dean of evaluation and assessment and a professor of the practice in psychology and neuroscience at Chapel Hill. “But it’s an effective tool when done well.”
And in the end, that’s all a system for calling on students is, Hogan says — one tool that might help professors in the complex, continuing work of building a good learning environment.
