The Productive Scholar: Janet Temos on Clickers in the Classroom

Thurs­day, Decem­ber 13, 12:00 noon
East Pyne Room 012
Class­room feedback/response

Janet Temos

Ask­ing your stu­dents ques­tions and get­ting instant responses is a great way of assess­ing whether learn­ing and under­stand­ing is tak­ing place. Come learn how you can use click­ers in the class­room to do quick assessments.

About the speaker:

Janet Temos is the Direc­tor of the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Cen­ter at Prince­ton. She is a mem­ber of the Prince­ton class of 1982, and received her PhD at Prince­ton in 2001. The ETC helps fac­ulty use tech­nol­ogy in teach­ing and research, and includes Black­board, the New Media Cen­ter, the Human­i­ties Resource Cen­ter. We also offer con­sult­ing, train­ing and out­reach in edu­ca­tional technologies.

In her ses­sion on Class­room Click­ers, Temos started with a com­mon ques­tion that many fac­ulty have: “What are Clickers?”

iClicker’s Clicker+

For this talk, Temos focused mostly on “mechan­i­cal” or hard­ware based click­ers, though soft­ware based response sys­tems exist. Mechan­i­cal click­ers are plas­tic, wire­less devices with but­tons for an audi­ence to show a response. The photo (left) is an exam­ple clicker sim­i­lar to the ones offered at Prince­ton. These inter­face wire­lessly with a paired receiver con­nected to a com­puter. The facil­i­ta­tor sets this sys­tem up to track responses. You might be most famil­iar with the sys­tem from game shows, such as the “Life­line” fea­ture from Who Wants to Be a Mil­lion­aire, where the audi­ence responds with their beliefs about the best answer. Most often at Prince­ton, we use click­ers as an imme­di­ate stu­dent response sys­tem, a way for stu­dents to give track­able, chartable responses to a given ques­tion so that a fac­ulty mem­ber can gain under­stand­ing about stu­dent com­pre­hen­sion or beliefs. Temos explained that they are also some­times used as an ani­mal train­ing sys­tem, a method for track­ing atten­dance, and are some­times also called a per­sonal response system.

Accord­ing to Temos, click­ers are best suited for large classes, questions that have answers based on opin­ion or newly deliv­ered infor­ma­tion, and class ses­sions that allow for some time to con­sider the ques­tion fully.

Here is an exam­ple of in-class use by Eric Mazur at Har­vard in which he asks stu­dents to respond to a ques­tion about physics, and after see­ing their response results as a class, he asks them to dis­cuss and explain their answer choice with the stu­dents next to them, then answer the ques­tion again, allow­ing Mazur to assess changes in under­stand­ing and focus his teach­ing for improved clar­ity and understanding.

(Har­vard Mag­a­zine on YouTube)

We learned that some of the ben­e­fits of click­ers include the abil­ity to offer a pause to a chal­leng­ing lec­ture, an oppor­tu­nity for audi­ence feed­back, and an oppor­tu­nity for energy release, or a way to break ten­sion. You can use instant feed­back to add lev­ity to an oth­er­wise seri­ous or heavy dis­cus­sion. Per­haps most impor­tantly, click­ers offer a great oppor­tu­nity to check stu­dent under­stand­ing of dif­fi­cult top­ics before mov­ing on to other top­ics that need that understanding.

Temos explained that click­ers are not nec­es­sar­ily the best way to do a sur­vey, quiz or poll. The syn­chro­nous nature of the imme­di­ate feed­back may affect a sur­vey by hav­ing the responses influ­ence a typ­i­cally per­sonal expe­ri­ence. For exam­ple, in a clicker based poll about sched­ul­ing, a stu­dent may want to have their alter­nate class meet­ing on Tues­days, but since the clicker responses show every­one else choos­ing Thurs­days, they may ignore their own needs. In a typ­i­cal asyn­chro­nous sur­vey using paper or an elec­tronic form, the stu­dent would be more likely to answer as they truly feel. Imme­di­ate feed­back is the most impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in decid­ing to use click­ers, so in sit­u­a­tions where the ques­tion ben­e­fits from know­ing the answer right away, click­ers are a great solution.

Here are some things to con­sider about how to get them at Princeton:

1. OIT lends them for one-time anony­mous polling in a course.
2. There is no charge for bor­row­ing, but loans are given on a first-come first-served basis.
3. Courses have pri­or­ity over admin­is­tra­tive or other use.

For long-term use, like if you’d like to use click­ers for the entire semes­ter, you might ask your aca­d­e­mic depart­ment to pur­chase click­ers for depart­men­tal use. You can also assign click­ers as course mate­ri­als, and sim­ply ask your stu­dents to buy them at the book­store as required mate­ri­als. Note that inte­gra­tion with Black­board is now bet­ter than it has been in the past, and allows for easy asso­ci­a­tion between stu­dents and click­ers. Also, if you are not look­ing for click­ers for a course and you need 400 click­ers for a large sin­gle event, you can even rent them.

Other meth­ods you might con­sider instead of click­ers for asyn­chro­nous feedback:

• Use Black­board quizzes sur­veys and tests
• Course blogs with live polls. (Using Pin­ion or PollDaddy)
• Google Forms
• Qualtrics, Princeton’s Sur­vey and poll tool
• Live back-channeling with social media tools, like Twitter.

Why did Prince­ton choose iClicker as a stu­dent response system?

iClicker offers a blended solu­tion, and allows you to mix phys­i­cal click­ers with an online response sys­tem. Also, most online responses sys­tems man­date stu­dent fees, which we try to avoid. Borrowed click­ers are free for stu­dents and fac­ulty at Prince­ton. We have about 200 on offer for loans.

For more infor­ma­tion about iClicker, instant feed­back solu­tions at Prince­ton, or other instruc­tional tech­nol­ogy issues, please con­tact

A screen­cast of Janet’s talk is com­ing soon.