Teaching with Clickers

What Do Students Appreciate Most about Clickers?

In a class of several hundred students, it is virtually impossible for each student to participate and interact with the professor. I like the

Quizdom system because it allows each student to actively participate and thus gauge their comprehension.

They allow me to interact with the material and make sure that I understand the lecture. They force me to apply what I've learned, also

ensuring that I will be better able to remember it in the future.

Using the clicker gives me a chance to think about what I'm actually writing down in my notes, rather than just having a collection of

incomprehensible formulas scattered through my notes.

Sample of student survey responses (Zhu, Bierwert, & Bayer, 2006, 2007)

What Is a Clicker?

A clicker system consists of three components:

1) clickers: wireless handheld transmitters that resemble small, TV remote controls;

2) receiver: a transportable device that receives signals from the clickers; and

3) software: an application installed on the instructor's computer to record, display, and manage student responses and data.

Although radio frequency transmission seems to have become the standard for now (Duncan, 2006), infrared transmission is also still in use. The design of clicker pads varies widely, and the different clicker systems -Classroom Performance System (CPS), Audience Response System, Qwizdom, TurningPoint, H-ITT, Classtalk - are incompatible.

How Are Faculty Using Clickers in the Classroom?

Since the 1980s, the use of clickers has proliferated on college campuses. Faculty from various disciplines such as biology, chemistry, history, mathematics, political science, law and psychology have introduced clicker systems into their classrooms. Faculty use clickers for various purposes depending on their course goals and learning objectives. The most common uses of clickers include the following:

Assessing students' prior knowledge and identifying misconceptions before introducing a new subject

Prior knowledge is necessary for learning but can be problematic if it is not accurate or sufficient. It is a good practice for faculty to assess students' prior knowledge of a subject and identify common misconceptions in order to find an appropriate entry point for introducing a new topic. By using clicker multiple-choice questions, faculty can quickly gauge students' knowledge level. For instance, in a Fall 2006 Chemistry class at U-M, the professor started each lecture with clicker questions asking students to identify new concepts or distinguish between various new concepts discussed in the assigned readings.

Checking students'understanding of new material

Clicker technology makes it easy for faculty to check students' mastery of lecture content. The immediate display of student responses enables faculty and students to see how well students understand the lecture. As a result, faculty can decide whether there is a need for further instruction or supplementary materials. By seeing peers' responses, students can gauge how well they are doing in relation to others in the class and determine which topics they need to review or bring to office hours.

Using Peer Instruction and other active learning strategies

Peer Instruction (Mazur, 1997) and Think-Pair-Share (Lyman, 1981) are cooperative learning strategies that faculty often use to probe students'understanding of lecture content and encourage them to discuss, debate, and defend their answers during lecture. The strategy entails posing a question to students, giving them time to think and discuss their responses with a partner, and then describing the results to the whole class.

Clicker technology makes the use of these strategies feasible and manageable, even for large classes. For example, the instructor will plan for each lecture several concept questions that focus more on the analysis and evaluation of information than simple recall, rote memorization, or calculation. Students are asked to share and discuss their responses with partners. Some faculty ask students to respond twice to difficult questions, once right after they read the question and then again after they talk to their partners. The faculty member then reviews and explains students' different responses, helping them clear up their misconceptions.

Research in physics (Crouch & Mazur, 2001) shows that students' cognitive gains from peer instruction are significant: students' scores on tests measuring conceptual understanding improved dramatically; their performance on traditional quantitative problems improved as well.

Starting class discussion on difficult topics

The anonymity of responses facilitated by the clicker technology allows faculty to initiate class discussion and debate on sensitive topics that might otherwise be difficult to explore. For example, questions on controversial issues in a political science course can sometimes be met with absolute silence (Abrahamson, 1999), but the use of clickers can help change classroom dynamics. Faculty can start the class lecture or discussion by posing controversial questions and offering "common-sense" multiple-choice responses. Students' responses, and their questions about their peers' responses, can provide an opening for class discussion. When students recognize their own opinions and co-direct a class discussion, they may feel a greater sense of ownership over the lecture and discussion. As a result, they will be more engaged in and responsible for their own learning. Also, instead of drawing conclusions from the most vocal students, the faculty member receives

a far more accurate overview of opinions from the entire class. Most important, the anonymous feature of the clicker system ensures that viewpoints that might not otherwise be expressed during class discussion are given a voice.

Administering tests and quizzes during lecture

The relative ease of managing students' responses has made the clicker system a helpful device for testing and grading during lecture. Features such as automatic scoring and record-keeping for each student enable faculty to administer all sorts of tests and quizzes in large lecture halls. For example, in one physics class at U-M, students' responses to questions posed during lecture are scored. Students who answer the questions correctly earn points that count toward a small percentage of the course grade (allocating too many points to a clicker quiz can increase the likelihood of cheating). Moreover, with instant feedback from students, faculty can adjust the pace of a lecture and the amount of content presented, assist students in identifying their knowledge deficiency, help students re- evaluate their study strategies, and determine what additional resources they might need to provide.

Gathering feedback on teaching

With clicker technology, faculty can gather anonymous feedback on their own teaching by asking students to respond to questions regarding the lecture, class discussion, homework assignments, group activities, or the overall learning experience in the course. If used early in the term, faculty can make changes to the class that benefit students before the end of the term.

Recording class attendance and participation

Taking attendance in a large lecture course is usually daunting, if not impossible. But with a system that recognizes each student, it is feasible and convenient for faculty to take student attendance in a large lecture. For example, students' responses to questions asked at the beginning of the lecture often serve as a record of their attendance. The instructor can easily run reports on student responses and find out who is present or absent from the class.

Admittedly, faculty hold different views on student class attendance. Some firmly believe that being in class and listening to a lecture is an integral part of learning, making class attendance a must; others think it is not essential for learning and it can be left to the students to decide. Similarly, student opinions about mandatory class attendance vary. Some U-M students surveyed in 2006 and 2007 responded negatively when clickers were used only to check class attendance (Zhu, Bierwert, & Bayer).

There are many other creative ways clickers are being used in classrooms. Draper, Cargill, and Cutts (2002) list three: Students can use them to give anonymous feedback on their peers'class presentations by responding to a brief post-presentation survey. Faculty can create a sense of community and group awareness by clustering people's hobbies, habits, and preferences through student responses to anonymous surveys. Faculty may also use clickers for psychological experiments. Kam & Sommer (2006) note the use of clickers for campaign simulation and polling research, as well as the technology's ability to monitor and facilitate individual and group games. In summary, the only limitation on innovative applications of clickers is the creativity of the instructor.

Online Tutorial for Designing Effective and Innovative Courses

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Online Tutorial for Designing Effective and Innovative Courses

Is it time to really shake the tree and do something about one of your courses? Do you have a great idea for an innovative course but aren't quite sure where to start in designing it? If so, you might try using the following online tutorial designed to provide practical and effective help for faculty members interested in designing or redesigning a course:

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/index.html

This tutorial is an on-line version of a face-to-face course design workshop developed and taught to literally hundreds of undergraduate faculty in a variety of disciplines for over 12 years by Barbara Tewksbury (Hamilton College) and Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary). While the workshop was originally designed for geoscience faculty, the tutorial provides examples from other disciplines, including those of you outside the sciences, and offers an easy-to-apply strategy for designing courses in any discipline. This tutorial is designed to give you a way to get your arms around what is typically a daunting task and will guide you through a practical, effective strategy for designing or redesigning an effective and innovative course.

Overall philosophy

We believe that a course should do more than provide students with a strong background of knowledge in a field. We believe that a course should enable students to use their strong backgrounds to solve problems, and that a truly valuable course should focus beyond the final exam to add to students' future lives, abilities and skill sets and prepare students to think for themselves in the discipline after the course is over. Designing such a course is a challenge and involves providing not only opportunities for students to master content but also opportunities for students to practice thinking for themselves in the discipline so that they will be prepared to do so after the course is over.

Why use our tutorial?

This tutorial provides a pathway through what can look like a big, amorphous, overwhelming task and presents a logical way to proceed from the glimmer of a good idea toward a new course while avoiding too much blundering in the dark. Using this tutorial lets you avoid wasting energy on reinventing the wheel. We provide links to hundreds of activities that can be used either directly or indirectly as templates, plus examples of goals and syllabi that can be used as catalysts for your own work and that were developed by other faculty.

We know that the design strategy in this tutorial works. Workshop participants comment that our course design process helped them to develop rigorous, effective, and innovative courses and to make thoughtful choices about what and how to teach. In a follow-up survey of workshop participants, 90% of respondents followed through to teach the rigorous, goals-based, innovative course that they had begun to develop at the workshop. Furthermore, 80% of respondents found our course design process so useful that they followed it again when designing or redesigning another course.

Who is this tutorial for?

Most of the examples in this tutorial come from undergraduate courses in the geosciences, although some portions have links to examples from undergraduate courses in other disciplines. Despite the focus on geoscience, the process is generic, and we've used simple examples. If you are interested in designing a course outside the geosciences, you should have little trouble using the tutorial.

The tutorial itself

Course context. Teaching a course involves making choices about what an instructor will ask students to do and why. External factors such as course size, context, student demography, and support structure are significant and should influence the choices that need to be made during course design. We begin the tutorial by having you articulate who your students are, what they need during the course, and what they might need in the future.

Setting overarching goals. The heart of the tutorial involves having you set student-focused goals that enable your students, at an appropriate level, to think for themselves in the discipline, not just expose them to what professionals know. You will set goals that focus your course on developing students' abilities to think for themselves and solve problems in the discipline while still addressing mastery of content.

Setting ancillary skills goals. Before proceeding to content and course plan, you will set one or two ancillary skills goals for your students (e.g., improving writing, teamwork, oral presentation).

Choosing content to achieve overarching goals. Every field is awash in more than a semester's worth of content, and every one of us faces decisions about what content to include and what content to omit. You will make decisions about content by considering what general content topics could be used to achieve the overarching goals you have set for your students, rather than by making a laundry list of content that students should be exposed to.

Developing a course plan. A course plan includes not only the goals and the content topics, but also the order of content and concepts in each broad content topic, and how students will receive goal-related practice with increasing independence as they encounter content and concepts. You will choose appropriate classroom, assignment, and assessment strategies that both help students learn effectively and allow you to evaluate whether students have met the goals.

For Faculty Developers

We now have a complete description of how we run our course design workshops, including links to all of the materials we use to run our workshops, a detailed schedule, tips for adapting or adopting our workshop format, and suggestions for how to use our course design tutorial with faculty. You can find these materials on line at

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/coursedesign/tutorial/for_developers.html

This course design tutorial is part of a larger web collection of professional development resources developed for undergraduate geoscience faculty through the NSF-funded program On the Cutting Edge ( http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/index.html ).