Q&A

Intro

The Q&A activity in LAMS allows you to pose open-ended questions to students and gather their individual responses in a shared space. Once students submit their answers, they can view and engage with their peers’ responses, creating a rich environment for reflection, comparison, and discussion.

This activity is designed as an enquiry-based learning tool, rather than a formal assessment, helping you explore students’ thinking, interpretations, and prior knowledge.

Why do I want to use Q&A?

You can use Q&A to:

• Encourage reflection on key concepts, theories, or experiences

• Elicit diverse perspectives from students on complex or open topics

• Promote critical thinking by exposing students to alternative viewpoints

• Support peer learning through shared responses and discussion

• Create a low-stakes environment where students can express ideas freely

• Enable peer feedback, including commenting and rating responses

Educational Insight

The Q&A activity creates a powerful space for social learning and cognitive development. By requiring students to commit to an answer before seeing others, you promote independent thinking. When students then compare their responses with peers, they engage in reflection, evaluation, and self-correction.

What can I use Q&A for?

Q&A is particularly effective for:

• Open enquiry learning, where there is no single correct answer

• Pre-class or post-class reflection activities

• Exploring misconceptions or gaps in understanding

• Case-based or scenario-based discussions

• Ethical debates or opinion-based topics

• Knowledge checks before moving into deeper application activities

Pedagogies that use Q&A: Problem-Based Learning, Think-Pair-Share, Inductive learning, etc.

How does it work?

1. You create one or more open-ended questions for students to answer.

2. Students submit their responses individually, without seeing others’ answers initially.

3. After submission, students can view all peer responses on a shared screen.

4. You can choose to display responses:

   • With student names, or

   • Anonymously, to encourage honest participation

5. Optionally, you can enable students to:

   • Comment on each other’s responses

   • Rate responses, helping highlight strong contributions

6. Students reflect and recalibrate their understanding based on the range of answers shared

This process helps shift the focus from “getting the right answer” to understanding different ways of thinking.