What are clickers?

Electronic classroom response systems, commonly known as ‘clickers’, allow students to respond to multiple choice questions using a remote control.

After students submit their individual answers, the results are automatically collated and the class responses as a whole are projected onto a screen, usually as a histogram. Responses are commonly displayed anonymously, although they can be linked to individual students for grading/evaluation purposes. The instructor can then display the correct answer, or may choose to initiate class discussion before resetting the same question (Bruff, 2009).

In a traditional classroom, feedback can be acquired by a show of hands, by asking volunteers to share answers, or by the use of whiteboards or coloured cards to represent multiple choice responses. However, there are significant drawbacks to all of these methods. With a show of hands it is difficult to get a sense of the level of understanding across the entire class because students are inclined to copy one other, and when the hands are lowered the data are lost (Kay and Lesage, 2009). Relying on volunteers can be equally restrictive, as typically only the very brave or confident raise their hands. Using individual white boards or coloured cards provides a degree of anonymity, yet collating the responses remains a slow process (Kay and Lesage, 2009).  

In contrast, clickers provide a rapid means of gathering anonymous, simultaneous, class-wide feedback.  

The Benefits

There is a considerable body of evidence indicating that the use of clickers in lectures can have a marked positive effect on student performance (Kay and Lesage, 2009). 

Student involvement: students using clickers tend to be more engaged in the lecture topics. They participate more in class activities, pay more attention to the lecture material, and are more actively involved in class discussions.  

Attendance at lectures has been shown to increase when clickers are used, particularly when their use is linked to a portion of the student’s final grade.

Assessment: clickers assist the feedback cycle by ensuring anonymity, collecting and summarizing responses from all students in larger classes very quickly, and restricting the copying of answers. Students benefit from this information by being able to judge their level of understanding relative to that of the rest of the class.  Lecturers benefit too; they may alter the pace, or change the direction of a lecture mid stream to optimise student comprehension.

Learning: students feel they learn more when clickers are used, and studies have confirmed that students in clicker based classrooms score significantly higher on tests than those in traditional lecture formats.

Students’ reactions to using clickers have generally been positive.

Possible disadvantages

Like most other technologies, clicker hardware and software break down from time to time. This can create stress both among students when their votes fail to register (e.g., when the battery in their remote is dead), and among lecturers when an otherwise well-conceived lecture plan is disrupted. 

Teachers may find that they need to adjust their lecturing style so that they can respond immediately to student feedback. Many lecturers report that they need to substantially reduce their coverage of material to allow time to ask clicker questions.  It can also take considerable time to think of effective questions to stimulate debate and higher order thinking (Kay and Lesage, 2009).

Students, too, need to adjust to the challenge of a new method of learning.

Although some consider convincing data for the benefits of using clickers to be absent (Woelk, 2008), many instructors have ‘voted with their feet’ by installing the technology in classrooms and continuing to use it. These same instructors are very positive about using clickers e.g. (Ribbens, 2007; Woelk, 2008).

Clickers are useful in a variety of ways:

Clickers can be used for a number of different purposes in classroom situations (Bruff 2009):

• to monitor student attendance
• to guage student knowledge prior to the class
• to assess student attitudes
• to find out if students have done their assigned reading
• to confront common misconceptions
• to test students’ understanding (either graded or not)
• to stimulate class discussion

 It is also possible to engage clickers to develop higher order critical thinking skills (i.e. the analysis and application categories of Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom et al., 1956)), though little research has been conducted into developing questions with this objective in mind.

References

- Bloom, B.S., Engelhart, M.D., Walker, H.H., Furst, E.J., & Krathwohl, D.R. 1956. Taxonomy of educational objectives; the classification of educational goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive domain. Longman, Green and Co., New York.

- Bruff, D. 2009. Teaching with classroom response systems: creating active learning environments. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

- Kay, R.H., & Lesage, A. 2009. Examining the benefits and challenges of using audience response systems: A review of the literature. Computers & Education 53:819-827.

- Ribbens, E. 2007. Why I like clicker personal response systems. Journal of College Science Teaching 37:60-62. 

- Woelk, K. 2008. Optimizing the Use of Personal Response Devices (Clickers) in Large-Enrollment Introductory Courses. Journal of Chemical Education 85:1400-1405.