A high school math teacher in Florida has discovered that uncertainty is a great motivator for students.

According to a story in eSchool News online, teacher Paige Allison, who is also a University of Florida graduate student in educational anthropology (latest entry in my list of "majors I never knew existed"), came across this new technique for keeping students on their toes while researching another question: how to avoid calling on certain students, or types of students, more often than others.

Earlier research had shown that teachers tend to call on white male students more frequently than other types of students, and this tendency is considered a likely contributor to girls and minorities doing less well in math.

So Allison looked for a way to remove the possibility of teacher bias from the process of calling on students. She and a computer-savvy colleague created a program for a handheld computer. With the touch of a button, the computer randomly calls up the name of a student from the class roster. And that's the student who is asked to answer the question at hand.

Allison and other teachers she recruited to try the system found that not only did it eliminate the temptation to call on the "usual suspects" more often, but it lead to all students being more engaged in class.

With Allison's program, the name of a student who is picked to answer gets kicked right back into the system, eliminating the temptation to think "She's called on me once, no way she'll call on me again." My limited understanding of probability suggests that it is possible, though unlikely, that the same student could get called on repeatedly in a single class. Perhaps if I'd been a student in Allison's class, I would have paid enough attention to know if I was right about that.