Lunch & Learn: Clickers in the Classroom with Janet Temos

At OIT’s Lunch ‘n Learn sem­i­nar on Feb­ru­ary 7, Janet Temos, the Direc­tor of OIT’s Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter and Joshua Rabi­nowitz, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Chem­istry and the Lewis-Sigler Insti­tute for Inte­gra­tive Genomics, demon­strated the use of click­ers (also known as Per­sonal Response Sys­tems, and Stu­dent Response Sys­tems) in Uni­ver­sity class­rooms.
Before the talk, they dis­trib­uted sim­ple 5-button click­ers (sim­i­lar to TV remote con­trols) to each mem­ber of the audi­ence. Atten­dees got to expe­ri­ence first hand how to use the devices. The fact is… it’s not hard. To answer a ques­tion, audi­ence mem­bers sim­ply had to press one of the five but­tons, “A” through “E.” After respond­ing to a sim­ple ques­tion, Temos and Rabi­nowitz showed us that our answers had been tal­lied and dis­played the results. They also demon­strated that the answers can be dis­played as they are cast.

The dis­play of class responses can prompt fur­ther dis­cus­sion, and fac­ulty have the option of sav­ing results for later analy­sis or as part of stu­dent assess­ment.
These sys­tems pro­vide new ways to gauge stu­dents’ under­stand­ing of top­ics in class and they can help to focus stu­dents’ atten­tion dur­ing lec­tures. The sys­tems con­tain a small radio receiver con­nected to the instructor’s pre­sen­ta­tion com­puter, and the soft­ware for col­lect­ing the responses.
Temos and Rabi­nowitz played a short video about the use of click­ers at Har­vard. Physics pro­fes­sor Eric Mazur uses click­ers to teach by ques­tion­ing rather than by telling. The Click­ers pro­vide feed­back from stu­dents dur­ing a lec­ture. Mazur finds that he can use the clicker sys­tem to esti­mate the degree to which stu­dents have grasped key con­cepts. If many stu­dents seem con­fused, he can review the mate­r­ial.
Typ­i­cally, he’ll post a ques­tion and then ask stu­dents to think about their answer. He first tried a show of hands but found that stu­dents were influ­enced by those with quick, con­fi­dent responses. And unlike the usual pol­icy of call­ing on a vol­un­teer, the exer­cises involve the entire class, not just the stu­dents who quickly know the answers.
With the clicker sys­tem, he can instantly see the dis­tri­b­u­tion of responses. If after a minute, stu­dents remain unsure, he rec­om­mends that they make the best judg­ment or guess that they can. Some stu­dents, often the best stu­dents, vote quickly and cor­rectly. The strag­glers tend to guess, wors­en­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion. If most of the stu­dents under­stand the mate­r­ial, he tends not to dwell longer on the topic. If only half get it right, he encour­ages in-class dis­cus­sion of the ques­tion. Such cases can be extremely excit­ing for the stu­dents and often impel spir­ited debate. He reports that the force of rea­son tends to dom­i­nate, but there are times when the results sug­gest that more time on the topic is required.
Now aware of the ped­a­gog­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ties, Rabi­nowitz reports that he has inte­grated the use of click­ers in his lec­tures. He notes that stu­dents seem to grasp the mate­r­ial more intu­itively when they have to con­vince oth­ers of their posi­tion. Some of Rabi­nowitz’ stu­dents were avail­able at the end of the pre­sen­ta­tion to answer ques­tions from the trenches. Their response to click­ers was over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive and they felt that the click­ers helped to keep stu­dents engaged.
A pod­cast is avail­able. More infor­ma­tion on Uni­ver­sity use of click­ers may be found here.