Characterizing Questioning Patterns and Student Engagement Through Contextual Analysis of Real-Time Classroom Interactions

Abstract

Real-time classroom polling is now routine, yet the data it produces is usually read narrowly, as a correctness score or a headcount. Such readings say little about what a poll is doing within a lecture or how it shapes engagement. This is particularly relevant for short-response formats such as True/False, where the same question format can be used to test recall, check comprehension, or direct students' attention to a deliberately misleading statement. This study asks whether a poll's answer and instructional function can be determined by reading it against its lecture transcript, what cognitive levels of Bloom's taxonomy and instructional-function clusters the corpus contains, and how student engagement relates to answering correctly. We analyse a naturalistic corpus of 47 live sessions over 39 days, comprising 604 poll questions and 340,668 responses from 2,807 learners, most items True/False, read against time-aligned lecture transcripts and attendance. Reading each poll in context proves essential: the answer to 89% of polls is locatable in the lecture, and a recurring attention-checking device is visible only through context. Questioning is overwhelmingly lower-order and falls into seven instructional functions, and a poll's response follows its function rather than its wording. Engagement is broad but concentrated, and the class majority answers correctly 88.5% of the time, though a small set of high-consensus yet incorrect answers cannot be detected by agreement alone. An independent survey of 579 students agrees on what the polls are and on their participation, but reveals a gap between perception and reality: students cannot judge their own correctness, and the polls they find hardest are not those they answer worst.