Click on This!

Handheld ‘clicker' devices allow instructors to gauge students' understanding of classroom material

BY ANDREW VOWLES

When Wendy Keenleyside says her introductory biology class is clicking along, she means it literally. The instructor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology says handheld “clickers” give her a handy way to tell during a lecture whether the roughly 600 students in her Rozanski Hall class are grasping key concepts, no small task for any large-class instructor on campus. So convinced is she of the teaching value of the devices that she has become a bit of a champion among Guelph science departments for this fledgling classroom technology.

A relative handful of U of G instructors in the College of Biological Science and the College of Physical and Engineering Science are now investigating and experimenting with clickers as a way to engage students, particularly in larger classes.

Having completed pilot classes with the devices this winter, Keenleyside hopes to use them routinely come fall, depending on further discussions with the first-year biology steering committee. And at least one professor in the Ontario Agricultural College has handed out the keypads to students for the past three years for use as a grading tool, admittedly with mixed results so far.

Formally called audience in-class response systems, clickers are used in schools and universities, business and government to engage audiences and gauge responses or understanding of ideas. Handing over what looks like a stripped-down calculator about as thick as a CD case, Keenleyside explains how the palm-sized device works.

Two or three times during her pilot lectures, she punched a few keys on her laptop to flash up a quiz question on the overhead screen. Holding their battery-powered clickers like TV remotes, students pushed a numbered button on the keypad to “vote” for a multiple-choice or yes-no answer. A USB receiver plugged into her laptop captured the clicker signals from around the classroom (it can receive up to 1,000 signals at a time).

Pushing a few more keys prompts special software to tabulate the responses and display them as a bar graph or pie chart that allows her at a glance to determine what proportion of students have answered correctly. (Turning Technologies based in Ohio makes the devices and the requisite TurningPoint software to operate the system; the software is integrated with PowerPoint.)

She can alter the quiz to require students to respond within, say, 10 seconds. Or she might allow students to spend a few minutes discussing the question with their neighbours — what Keenleyside considers a form of peer teaching — before responding. The technology allows her to ask straightforward content questions (such as “Which of the following does not describe viruses?”) or to poll students' opinions (“Are viruses alive?”) on a scale from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.”

At the beginning of a class, she might pose a review question from the previous lecture. (In her pilot classes, she posed two or three questions to test key concepts.) Finding that a particular concept needs review, she might spend more time covering the material again.

The responses arrive anonymously, although she could amend the system to flag individual students' responses and even grade them. But Keenleyside plans to use clickers strictly for polling and for helping to tailor her lectures.

Being able to conduct in-class assessment is what led Prof. Rick Bates of the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics to introduce clickers to his introductory financial accounting classes in 2004.

Rather than collect responses anonymously, he has used software that allows him to tabulate and grade student responses in seconds, a speedier alternative to hand-marking a conventional pencil-and-paper quiz.

Bates says he's encountered pitfalls in using clickers with his classes of 500 to 600 students in Rozanski Hall. Earlier infrared devices required students to aim the clickers directly at his laptop or their responses might not register. He's eliminated that problem with more forgiving radio frequency units, also being used by Keenleyside.

He's also had logistical problems trying to link with WebCT to upload grades and to allow students to register their clicker identifiers online to create participant lists. He hopes a new version of WebCT being released this fall will make the job of matching names and grades seamless.

Clickers occasionally fail to work, usually because of improper use or mistreatment. If the device is jammed into a backpack, for instance, any depressed key will cause the battery to drain.

Still, Bates swears by clickers as a way to engage students in large classes. Although he lacks hard data, he believes proper use of the technology can improve student learning.

Once he posed a particular question about calculating depreciation that, as he had expected, stumped more than 90 per cent of the students during the regular lecture. Being able to immediately drive home the concept in class led to a startling improvement when he put the same question on a subsequent exam. About seven out of 10 students scored correctly that time.

“That implies to me that getting that instant feedback is what's effective. That's where clickers are useful.”

Bates also plans to make greater use of the technology to encourage more participation in problem review and opinion-gathering.

Fourth-year student Meghan Irwin took part in a clicker pilot led by Keenleyside in a second-year microbiology class. Irwin says using a clicker for grading would require students to answer quiz questions in a prescribed order and time without offering a chance to review or change their answers. But she says clickers would be an asset to any large lecture hall where professors are unable to receive questions from students or from smaller first- and second-year classes, where students might be a bit more intimidated about asking questions.

Having experimented with clickers in biology and microbiology classes, Keenleyside has discussed the devices with faculty groups — including the CBS dean's council — in hopes of introducing them more widely for large classes. Chemistry faculty plan to use clickers for introductory chemistry next fall. Using them in more classes would make clickers more economical for students. The devices cost $25 to $40 (often they're bundled in with a class textbook or custom courseware).

In a student poll, she found that students favoured the devices for pedagogical purposes but not for grading. Slightly more than half favoured their use in periodic grading, say, for six out of 10 interactive questions worth up to five per cent of their final grade.

Keenleyside says only about 10 per cent of students in a large classroom normally ask questions or respond to instructors. She views clickers as a way to encourage more students to engage with each other and their lecturer. Referring to studies in the United States, where more campuses are using the technology more intensively, she says: “The data say the more interaction among students or between students and the instructor, the more the knowledge gets absorbed and the more critical thinking occurs.”

So what entices normally reticent students to take out their clickers voluntarily in the classroom?

“It's fun; students like it,” says Keenleyside, who observes her own 18-year-old daughter's embrace of computing and communications technology at home. “They're tech-savvy. It's the same as podcasting — students demand technology in the class. If you don't use WebCT, they give you grief. If you don't use PowerPoint, they really give you grief.”

Says biology student Dave Marchand: “When asked to answer a question, one can answer without feeling shy about being wrong or about speaking in public. Although they are meant for larger classes, I would still like to see them used in smaller classes.”