2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Recent research has shown that use of polling (e.g. Top Hat) questions related to a course instructor’s personal life is appreciated by students and enhances the student-teacher relationship. However, research to date has only considered the same instructor utilizing the practice, and thus it has not been possible to determine whether the positive outcomes observed are limited to that instructor and public university setting, or if the benefits of the practice are more broadly transferable across instructor and university demographics.

In this work two instructors (female and male) at two different types of universities (public and private) employed ungraded / non-compulsory instructor trivia questions in their classes. Student perspectives on the practices will be examined for each instructor/setting through qualitative thematic analysis of responses to questions on end-of-the-semester course evaluations which aim to solicit student perceptions of the practice. Resulting emergent themes will be contrasted across the instructors/settings to indicate transferability of the practice’s benefits across demographics. Examples of each instructor’s trivia questions and lessons learned will also be provided in this work.