Getting students engaged using “clickers”
Audience Response Systems, or “clickers”, are an increasingly popular way to get students in large lecture courses engaged both with the material and with their fellow students. More than a dozen courses across the University are using clickers this semester, with 10 courses and more than 1500 students using them in SAS alone.
Clicker and Receiver
These clickers allow students to vote on a multiple-choice question that the instructor displays on the screen, and then see the histogram of the voting results and, optionally, the correct answer . We have standardized on clickers from TurningTechnologies.com, which provides free software for instructors to insert questions into PowerPoint presentations on either a PC or a Mac. Students can buy the clickers next to the textbook for their course in the Penn Bookstore for $40, and sell it back like a used textbook at the end of the term - unless they want to keep it to use in future courses, which is becoming more and more likely. SAS Computing loans instructors the receiver for the semester.
Instructors have found a variety of ways to use these clickers effectively. Some use them to gauge student understanding of a topic and determine how much time they need to spend on it during class. Others use it to have students answer a difficult question, or one where there are likely to be a variety of responses, and then discuss the answer with their neighbor and vote again before the correct answer is revealed. Students’ responses can be completely anonymous, or the instructor can set it up to have the students register their clicker number in Blackboard and then have each student’s response to the questions recorded so that their scores can be uploaded to the Blackboard Grade Center. Many instructors take a middle ground between these two approaches, having the students register their clickers, but only recording whether or not a student voted at all - not grading the actual responses. All of these approaches seem to keep students from “zoning out” in the middle of a large lecture, and instead stay engaged throughout the 50 or 80 minutes. They also ensure that every student’s opinion is counted, so that students in the front of the room aren’t given more attention than students toward the back, and they also avoid the peer pressure of voting with the largest group when hands are raised.
If you’re interested in learning more about this technology, please see the SAS Computing page on Using Clickers in the Classroom or the Weigle Information Commons page on Clickers - Personal Response Systems. There’s a seminar on November 5, 2008 at the WIC where you can learn more about clickers and try them out - click here for information and registration. We’ve also recorded a short video of two instructors discussing their use of clickers in the classroom - it’s available here. Please just get in touch with the contacts listed on the SAS Computing page or the WIC page if you’d like more information.
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