Back in May 2010, I led a webinar on teaching with clickers as part of the CIRTLcast series for the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), an NSF-sponsored network of six universities interested in preparing future science, engineering, and mathematics faculty. The full webinar was 60 minutes, and you can access the audio recording and my slides in the CIRTLcast archive. However, CIRTL has done a great job taking some excerpts from the session and packaging them as a 10-minute YouTube video, complete with a transcript!

In the video, you’ll hear me talk about using clickers to generate small-group and classwide discussion, create “times for telling,” encourage metacognition, facilitate peer assessment, structure class time, turn quizzes into learning experiences, and make class more fun. Clickers can be used very effectively to engage students in the learning process during class, and this short video is a nice introduction to these uses of clickers.

Thanks to CIRTL for giving me the opportunity to present this webinar and for putting together this great video!

Jeffrey R. Young's Chronicle article, "Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom," has apparently struck a nerve among professors, particularly those who are critical of educational technology. As I write this, the article has 59 comments on the Chronicle site, which is far more than most articles receive. Even the graph accompanying the article has received 13 comments!

Since clickers are mentioned in the article and in many of the comments, I thought I would weigh in here on the blog...

First, it's worth noting that Chris Dede, the Harvard University learning technologies professor interviewed for the article, doesn't make the argument that professors who don't use technology are shirking their duties. Several of those who left comments seem to think so, however. For example, here's comment #33 from Emily in NY:

"Dede does nothing in this article but set up a false dichotomy between professors committed to outdated, boring and irrelevant teaching methods and those eagerly embracing the modern technologies that contemporary students crave."

Here's the closest Dede comes to that argument, in the National Educational Technology Plan he helped draft for the US Department of Education in March:

"The challenge for our education system is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students' daily lives and the reality of their futures."

Dede's arguments in the Chronicle argument are focused on motivating professors to tap into the latest research on learning and continue to improve their teaching practices over time. From the report he drafted, it's clear he thinks that technology can help with that, but he doesn't seem to be making the argument that professors who don't use technology are irresponsible, just those who stick with the same teaching methods you'd find in a classroom circa 1900. Sure, technology can be a big part of change, but many of the teaching innovations mentioned in the article (such as David Pace's work on enhancing history teaching) don't involve any technology.

Speaking of false dichotomies, however, here's one from comment #18 by user "tee_bee":

"What matters is that students learn--and a skilled teacher with a blackboard is still going to do a far better job than a bozo with some clickers and powerpoint slides."

True, a skilled teacher is going to do a better job than a bozo any day, regardless of technology. But comparing a skilled teacher to a bozo isn't really important here. Might technology (including clickers) help a skilled teacher be even more effective? Yes, that happens. And might technology help a relatively novice teacher become more effective? Yes, that happens, too. Those are the kinds of changes in teaching that are worth thinking about and encouraging, and I think that's a point that Chris Dede would agree with.

How might teaching with clickers help a good teacher be even more effective? Several comments on the Chronicle article were skeptical of clickers' potential for doing this. For example, here's what user "ikant" said in comment #21:

"I'm young, tech-savvy, and pretty unconvinced by this article. I can't speak for all fields, of course, but I'm pretty skeptical that good class discussions and quality writing in the humanities are particularly improved by clickers etc... the heart of what I do is in trying to educe questions, critical thought and excitement about books which students might previously have thought were utterly irrelevant to them, and (my evaluations indicate that) I do this very well with no particular technological bells and whistles in the classroom. Am I missing something?"

I'm glad that this instructor is capable of leading effective class discussions, foster critical thinking, and increase student motivation in the classroom. Let me clear: Doing so is entirely possible without clickers! However, not all instructors are as skilled as "ikant" appears to be and even for instructors like "ikant," it's possible that clickers would enhance an already productive classroom environment. Some examples from past blog posts:

• Case Study: Using clickers to promote critical thinking in text-based, political science courses
• Case Study: Using clickers to teach ethics in a history class
• My Thoughts: Using clickers to foster creativity and collaboration
• My Thoughts: Using clickers to teach critical thinking in the humanities

Here's a similar comment (#26 on the Chronicle site) from user "csgirl":

"The reason I don't use blogs and clickers is that they simply are not appropriate to the material I teach. Clickers in particular are useless to me - I care about the strategies my students are using to solve problems, not whether they can click the right answer in a quiz."

This is a common misconception about clickers, that they're just good for quizzing students basic conceptual understanding and recall. Here's another formulation of it, from user "chewy18" in comment #53:

"They might work well for understanding basic concepts or in preparation for recognition/recall examinations where the test question is a line long and the answer a word or two in length. What about those of us who teach upper division courses where we struggle with students who have not, until they reach senior status, even been exposed to the analytical reasoning process. Suddenly they discover that life is, after all, not a multiple choice test and developing an argument that could go either way, is a requirement. How does that appeal to the clicker technology?"

Sure, clickers work well for assessing basic conceptual understanding and factual recall, but they're useful for teaching at the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, too. Here are some more examples from past blog posts that demonstrate this:

• Case Study: Using clickers to teach difficult material in upper-division physics
• Case Study: Using clickers to teach students about plagiarism in library instructional settings
• Case Study: Using clicker questions without single correct answers in mathematics
• Case Study: Using clickers to teach nursing students to make evidence-based decisions

And for "csgirl," here's a great collection of resources on using clickers and peer instruction in computer science from Daniel Zingaro.

Finally, you can imagine how this comment (#37) from user "fizmath" made me feel:

"The teacher/physician analogy is lousy. We have real data to show that new medical tech benefits patients. You can't say the same about blogs, videoconferencing and those stupid clickers."

(This is a response to Chris Dede's analogy that teachers who don't update their teaching methods over time are akin to physicians who don't update their medical practices over time.)

Want some research? Try these studies, all of which are well designed and support the claim that clickers used in appropriate ways enhance student learning:

• Stowell & Nelson (2007) - Clickers provided instructors with more accurate assessment of student learning during class than other response methods, including a show of hands.
• Yourstone, Kraye, & Albaum (2008) - The use of clickers for end-of-class quizzes improved student exam scores by four points over the use of pencil-and-paper quizzes discussed the next day in class, likely because of the immediate feedback clickers provided to students on their learning.
• Hoesktra (2008) - Clickers helped students be more attentive during class (since they know clicker questions could be asked at any time) and participate in more meaningful ways (both before votes are submitted and after results are displayed).
• Smith et al. (2009) - Students actually learned from each other when discussing clicker questions in pairs prior to voting. They don't "simply choose the answer most strongly supported by neighbors they perceive to be knowledgeable."
• Mayer et al. (2009) - Clickers made it easier for instructors to ask their students questions during class and for students to respond to those questions, leading to improved student learning through better class discussions.

My summary for those skeptical of using clickers in the classroom: Read the literature, find out how those in your discipline are using clickers effectively, and see (preferably by experimentation) if those methods might help you to enhance your teaching, regardless of how effective you are currently as a teacher. If a classroom response system doesn't help you do your job better, then don't use one. They're not for everyone. However, don't write clickers off without first investigating their potential. They're far more useful and versatile that you might think at first.

Image: "Innovation" by Flickr user thinkpublic, Creative Commons licensed

Continuing my reports from the contributed paper session on teaching with clickers I helped coordinate at the Joint Mathematics Meetings back in January…

“Using Prediction and Classroom Voting via Clickers to Address Students’ Overreliance on the Representativeness Heuristic,” Tami Dashley, University of Texas-El Paso [Slides]

Tami Dashley is a graduate student in math education and a student of Kien Lim, one of the organizers of the contributed paper session. She shared some of her thesis research, an investigation into the connection between classroom voting with clickers and certain misconceptions students have about probability. Her work focuses on the representativeness heuristic, which she defines as “determining the likelihood for events based on how well an outcome represents some aspect of its parent population.”

Tami gave the following example: Suppose you toss a coin six times, getting a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). Which of the following is more likely to occur: TTHHTH or HTTHHH? Someone using the representativeness heuristic would say that TTHHTH is more likely to occur since it includes an equal amount of heads and tails, just like the coin does. The other option includes more heads than tails, so it would not seem as likely to someone using the representativeness heuristic. Actually, both of those outcomes are equally likely (each occurring with probability 1/64), so the representative heuristic is a misleading one in this example.

The issue is that the representativeness heuristic is useful in some cases, but not useful in all cases. The misconception that many students have is that it’s always useful.

How to help students stop over-relying on the representativeness heuristic? Tami has been investigating the use of prediction questions, ones that ask students to predict an outcome or probability without actually computing anything. For example, students might be asked to determine which of several outcomes is most likely to occur. Since students need not be as precise when responding to prediction questions, they have some cognitive processing power freed up to focus on concepts. Clicker questions are a natural match here, since they allow students to commit to their predictions and compare their predictions to those of their peers. Then discussion of the incorrect answer choices provides an opportunity to deal with misconceptions.

Tami conducted her research in a high school setting, using three groups of students. Her “control” group received a lesson exploring the representativeness heuristic that didn’t ask the students to predict any probabilities. A second group was asked several prediction questions but didn’t use clickers to respond to the questions. The third group used clickers to respond to prediction questions during the lesson. Tami used pre- and post-tests to determined the efficacy of these three different lessons.

Tami found that her “control” group did pretty well on the post-test compared to the two experimental groups. However, most of their success came from what she called a “learned response.” In this case, many of the students picked up on the fact that “all of the above outcomes are equally likely” is often the correct answer to questions exploring the representativeness heuristic. (These are what students might call trick questions!) When Tami looked at performance on questions where “all of the above outcomes are equally likely” was, in fact, not the correct answer, the prediction-with-voting group performed better than the control and prediction-only groups.

I was very impressed with Tami’s research design and the subtlety with which she explored student misconceptions in this teaching context. I don’t believe that Tami has published this work yet, but I look forward to reading it when she does.

Image: “Heads and Tails” by Flickr user canonsnapper, Creative Commons licensed

Reference: Webking, R., & Valenzuela, F. (2006). Using audience response systems to develop critical thinking. In Banks, David A. (Ed.), Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing.

Summary: Webking and Valenzuela describe ways they use classroom response systems in their political sciences courses at the University of Texas-El Paso to foster critical thinking through active participation and class discussions. After noting some commonly cited advantages of teaching with clickers—easier attendance and participation record-keeping, greater participation through anonymity and accountability, and the collection of data to inform agile teaching decisions—the authors provide several concrete examples of clicker questions they have found valuable for developing their students’ critical thinking skills.

The authors’ first example is a sequence of clicker questions that serve to guide students through a close reading of a few passages in the play Antigone. At one point in the play, Antigone makes a statement that seems to very clearly express her belief that obedience to the gods trumps obedience to the king. At another point, however, she makes a somewhat cryptic statement that calls this previous assertion into question. Webking and Valenzuela start with an understand-level question that asks students to clarify this second statement. They follow this with an application-level question asking students to identify a logical consequence of her cryptic statement, one which seems to run counter to her earlier statement about serving the gods. Their third question is an analysis-level one, and it asks students to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements by Antigone by identifying a hidden motivation of hers that makes her statements consistent.

Webking and Valenzuela also describe how they use a particularly challenging, analysis-level question about Plato’s Euthyphro. The question asks students to identify the central argument of a particular passage, one that deals with the relationship between justice and piousness. The question is one that Jean McGivney-Burelle would call a “horizontal question” since students answering the question are typically split evenly among three answer choices. Webking and Valenzuela note that one of the three popular responses can’t be supported by the text. Students who argue for this answer choice quickly realize that they were projecting their own perspectives on the text, not arguing from the text. This is a useful metacognitive moment for these students. The class discussion then focuses on the remaining two popular answer choices. Making sense of these two choices requires the students to grapple with categorical logic, the kind that is well-represented by Venn diagrams. Once the students have discussed their way to the correct answer, they realize the value of categorical logic in making sense of arguments like the ones Plato makes—another metacognitive moment.

The Plato example comes from one of the authors’ smaller, upper-level courses, and they assert that “it is in a smaller class that the [classroom response] system is at its best in encouraging discussion and precise argument.” They reach this conclusion, in part, because of the ability of their classroom response system to report to the instructor individual student responses to clicker questions as those responses are submitted. The authors use these individual, real-time results to guide their post-vote discussions, focusing on “groups which had difficulties in reaching consensus, students or groups which answered particularly quickly or particularly slowly, students who disagreed with their groups, students who changed their minds, and so on.” They argue that the ability to see individual, real-time results is important in leading effective post-vote discussions since it allows instructors to analyze “each student’s rational odyssey with each question.”

Also in the article are two examples of student perspective questions the authors use to motivate particular topics in their courses. In one example, they ask students to identify questions they aren’t likely to ask someone they’ve just met. Invariably, students identify the questions about religion and politics. The authors point out to students that one reasonable conclusion from this is that religion and politics are the least important things to know about when getting to know someone. This motivates students to want to learn why this social phenomenon exists.

Comments: This would be a great article to give a faculty member in political science or philosophy who’s interested in getting started teaching with clickers. Webking and Valenzuela provide a concrete, interesting example of a guided close reading of a text (Antigone) using clicker questions of increasing difficulty. This is a great model for instructors in the humanities and social sciences interested in helping their students develop critical thinking and close reading skills. I wish, however, that they had included some voting data in this example and had discussed how they use the results of these questions to guide discussions, as they did with their Plato example.

The Plato example is a great model of clicker use in text-based courses, too. One reason is that the approach Webking and Valenzuela use leads students to appreciate the nature of argument in their discipline. They write, “In time, and actually not very much time, students learn to care more about the strength of the argument than about having their initial position defended as right.” The authors present a useful list of options for leading these kinds of class discussions—focusing on groups that were conflicted, students who answered quickly or slowly, students who changed their minds, etc.

The authors assert that the quality of discussions they can foster depends on the availability to the instructor of real-time, individual voting data. Not all classroom response systems have this feature and, in my experience, instructors who have the option of looking at individual results as they come in don’t frequently take advantage of this option. I think that perhaps the availability of real-time, individual results isn’t as critical as Webking and Valenzuela assert. I’ll often have my students vote on a question individually, then discuss it in groups, then vote again. I’ll sometimes ask for a student who changed his or her mind from the first vote to the second vote to explain his or her reasoning. I can also see asking for a student who disagreed with his or her group to contribute to the post-vote discussion.  (That’s a nice idea, one that I’ll have to try soon!)

My approach, using the aggregate and not individual voting data, relies on students who fit certain profiles volunteering to share their perspectives with the class. Webking and Valenzuela’s approach doesn’t rely on volunteers, but it isn’t quite cold-calling, either, since they select students only after the students have had a chance to consider and respond to the clicker question. I’d like to call this “warm-calling” since the students have had a chance to warm up to the question and since the instructors aren’t calling on students without any knowledge of what those students might contribute to the discussion. I’m not familiar with many instructors who practice warm-calling.  If you do, I’d love to hear from you in the comments about your experiences doing so.

Image: “Coffin Sculpture of Antigone” by Flickr user Xuan Rosamanios / Creative Commons licensed

Continuing my reports from the contributed paper session on teaching with clickers I helped coordinate at the Joint Mathematics Meetings back in January…

“Using Personal Response Systems (Clickers) in Liberal Arts Mathematics Courses to Support a Lecture Format,” Janet A. White, Millersville University of Pennsylvania [Slides]

Just like Jean McGivney-Burelle and Kimberly Burch, Janet White shared her experiences teaching with clickers in a “liberal arts” mathematics course taken by non-majors. Unlike Jean and Kimberly, who teach relatively small sections of this kind of course, Janet teaches in a large lecture hall with 75 students per section. Janet had used clickers in courses for pre-service math teachers in the past and found them useful, so when it was her turn to teach this larger course, she decided to use them again. A classroom response system was hardly the only technology Janet used in this course: She also had students complete online homework and quizzes and she annotated her PowerPoint lecture slides using an Interwrite Mobi.

Janet used clickers on a daily basis in her course, usually either to assess students’ prior knowledge or to assess their understanding of a topic taught during lecture.  Her questions came from a bank of multiple-choice questions provided by her textbook publisher.  She counted the clicker questions as part of her students’ participation grades, but in a low-stakes manner.  Given her use of the questions as well as the source of the questions, many were on the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, aimed at recall and application of procedural knowledge.  She shared an example of a prior knowledge question that asked students to find the measure of an angle that complements a 36 degree angle.  A slightly harder question aimed at assessment of something taught during the course asked students to identify the cut edge in a given graph (or to assert that the graph had no cut edge).

Student survey results indicated that 85% of Janet’s students who used clickers regularly liked using them, and 71% said that using clickers helped them learn the material.  Students who used clickers regularly during the course ended up with higher grades in the course than students who didn’t, but, of course, that can’t necessarily be attributed to the use of the clickers.  (And since clicker questions were factored in the course grade, students who participated more frequently in clicker questions would almost certainly have higher grades in the course anyway.)

Student comments about the clickers were generally positive.  My favorite one was, “I liked getting the wrong answer anonymously.”  Other comments addressed the usual points that students like about clickers: They liked the interactivity, they liked discussing questions with classmates, they liked seeing where they stood relative to their peers, and they liked the feedback on their own learning the clicker questions provided.  The only significant negative aspect for the students was the cost, about $50 in Janet’s case.

Janet found that having students discuss clicker questions in small groups led to very engaged students, even in the large auditorium environment.  In the future, she plans to write more of her own questions, instead of relying on ones from the textbook’s question bank.  She hopes to write more difficult questions that will generate even more engaged discussion during class.  She’s also hoping to find ways to reduce the technology cost to the students, either by selecting a different vendor or facilitating the resale of clickers after each semester to students taking the course the next semester.

Also, Janet mentioned that the earth science faculty at Millersville are big users of clickers.  Earth science instructors looking for advice on using clickers might want to investigate!

Image: “Recursive Daisy” by Flickr user gadl / Creative Commons licensed

Continuing my reports from the contributed paper session on teaching with clickers I helped coordinate at the Joint Mathematics Meetings back in January…

“Clickers in the Classroom,” Kimberly J. Burch, Indiana University of Pennsylvania [Slides]

Kimberly teaches a “Math 101″ survey course called “Foundations of Mathematics.”  Topics covered include set theory, graph theory, and counting methods (among others), and Kimberly shared several interesting clicker questions on each of these topics.  For example, here’s one of her questions from the unit on graph theory:

How many vertices are there in a tree with 19 edges?

1. 19
2. 18
3. 20
4. Not enough information given

Kimberly practices the “classic” peer instruction technique of having students vote individually first, then discuss the questions in small groups, then vote again.  She finds that students often converge to the correct answer on the second vote.

In the example above, her students were split between 18 and 20 on the first vote, but after the peer discussion time, most students went with the correct answer, 20.  I found this interesting because the “Not enough information given” seemed to be the obvious wrong answer to this question.  A graph with 19 edges might have any number of vertices, but a tree with 19 edges can only have 20 vertices.  Students who don’t realize that trees are graphs with very specific properties might be tempted to go for the “Not enough information given” option.

I suspect that Kimberly used this question after the students learned the relationship between the number of edges and number of vertices in a tree and that this question was meant to assess whether students remembered that relationship.  Some students likely remembered that one of these numbers was one more than the other but weren’t sure which one was higher.  That would account for the split vote between 18 and 20.  Had this question been asked as an exploratory question and not a review question, I’m betting the split would have been between 20 and “Not enough information given.”

Kimberly also mentioned that she uses her clicker system’s priority ranking questions to have her students decide what topics should be emphasized during exam review sessions.  Kimberly gives her students a list of 8-10 exam topics, and the students indicate the top three or four toughest topics in order.  Kimberly said that this helps her make good use of limited exam review time by focusing on the topics the students find the most difficult.

Kimberly also shared some data from a quasi-control group experiment she conducted.  She taught two sections of this survey course and alternated which topics she covered with clickers in the two sections.  For example, section A might cover topic 1 with clickers while section B covered topic 1 without.  Then for topic 2, section B used clickers and section A didn’t.  She then compared test scores for the two sections by topic.  For some topics, students using clickers performed better on exams but for other topics, the students not using clickers performed better.  And for other topics, there was no difference.  The data was generally favorable to using clickers, but the “quasi” part of this quasi-control group experiment made it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

Image: “Point Marian Bridge” by Flickr user timmenzies / Creative Commons licensed

File this under “Better Late Than Never.”  Back in January 2010, I coordinated (with Kelly Cline and Kien Lim) a contributed paper session on teaching with clickers at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco.  Shortly after the conference, I blogged about some clickers talks that didn’t fall in our session, but I never got around to blogging about the talks in our session!  Five months later, I’m finally getting around to sharing my notes from those talks…

“The Evolution of Classroom Voting in Contemporary Mathematics,” Jean McGivney-Burelle, University of Hartford [PowerPoint Slides]

Jean teaches a “math for the liberal arts” course called Contemporary Mathematics taken by music and arts majors among others.  She finds her students come to the course with relatively little interest or self-reported ability in mathematics, so it’s a tough crowd to teach.  A few years ago, she started teaching with clickers in order to appeal to what she calls the “thumb generation”–students used to spending a lot of time sending text messages.

Jean interspersed some clicker questions throughout her lectures and encouraged students to discuss them in small groups before voting.  She and the students liked this, but she found that most of her questions were answered correctly by most of her students  and that the small group discussions didn’t involve much debate among students.  The next year, Jean decided to ask tougher questions.  She calls them QEDs–Questions to Encourage Discussion.  She aimed for the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

For example, in Jean’s first year using clickers she gave her students a preference schedule–a list of how each voter in an electorate (only four of them to keep things simple) ranked all of the candidates.  She then asked her students to determine which candidate would win the election using the instant run-off voting scheme.  This is a straight-forward application of a particular algorithm.

The next year, Jean asked another question in which she shared a preference schedule with her students and asked them to analyze it.  However, this time, she asked the question at the beginning of the unit on voting schemes and asked her students to indicate which of the candidates had the best case for winning the election.  There’s no single correct answer to this question since winner of an election (well, one involving at least three candidates) depends on what scheme you use to count the votes.  This is a great example of a one-best-answer question (since students are asked to select the one answer they think is best among multiple reasonable answers) used to create a time for telling (since it’s used to make the point that which voting scheme you use matters).

Jean found that these more challenging and ambiguous questions generated longer and more engaged small group discussions as well as more “horizontal” bar graphs–ones indicating significant disagreement among the students.  Looking ahead, she plans to build on this success by writing questions designed to develop mathematical habits of mind–an important goal of this course.  For example, here’s a sample question she shared aimed at pointing students towards the notions of proof and counterexamples:

Suppose there is a majority winner in an election. Will all of the voting methods we have studied thus far always pick that winner?  Yes or no?  If you answer yes, prepare to defend your answer. If you answer no, have a counterexample ready.

I really like this question.  It has a degree of ambiguity that students often find disconcerting, but it also reminds students of how they’ll need to defend their answers, which should help put their minds at ease.  As Jean noted in her talk, in a course like this one, it’s more important students develop mathematical habits of minds (like the ones surfaced by this question) than learn particular math content areas.  I hope this kind of question helps with this objective.

Stay tuned to the blog for more notes on these talks over the coming days…

Image: “Deep Down Inside, We All Love Math” by Flickr user Network Osaka / Creative Commons licensed

I’ve scheduled this post to appear on the blog just as I’m starting my keynote at the University of Louisville clickers conference in Louisville, Kentucky.

• For those of you not at the conference, you can get a sense of what I’m talking about right now by checking out my Prezi below.  You’re welcome to weigh in on Twitter about these ideas.  Just tag your tweets with #ULclickers so I’ll see them.
• For those of you at the conference, you’ll find below links to a few resources mentioned in my talk.  Feel free to explore these after the keynote!  (Or during… I’m cool with that.)

My talk is titled “Connecting with Participatory Culture: Clickers and Deep Learning.”  Here’s the abstract:

Today’s students vote for their favorite contestants on American Idol, “like” a friend’s wall post on Facebook, comment on news and events on Twitter, and engage in robust online discussions about World of Warcraft.  We live in a participatory culture, one in which voting, commenting, creating, and sharing are the norm and people prefer being contributors to being consumers.  Teaching with clickers is one way to tap into this culture, engaging students in ways that motivate them to participate during class in meaningful ways.  In this talk, Derek Bruff will explore ways that using clickers connects with our students’ participatory culture and how those connections can be leveraged to promote deep learning.

And here’s my Prezi:

Finally, some relevant resources:

Like Buttons / Student Perspective Questions

• Matthew Freeman’s perspective questions come from this article: Campt, D., & Freeman, M. (2009). Talk through the hand: Using audience response keypads to augment the facilitation of small group dialogue. The International Journal of Public Participation, 3(1), 80-107.  Here’s my summary.

Text-to-Vote / Peer Assessment Questions

• A description of Kori Street’s use of clickers for peer assessment can be found on pages 94-96 of my book.

Serious Fans / Misconception Questions

• The research on World of Warcraft forum discussion can be found here: Steinkuehler, C. & Duncan, S. (2009). Informal scientific reasoning in online virtual worlds. Journal of Science Education & Technology. DOI: 10.1007/s10956-008-9120-8.  See also Constance Steinkuehler’s other research.
• Derek Hansen’s visualizations of edits to Lostpedia, a wiki for the TV show Lost
• The “time for telling” idea comes from this article: Schwartz, D. L., & Bransford, J. D. (1998). A time for telling. Cognition and Instruction, 16(4), 475-522.
• My misconception question about lie detectors is adapted from Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks by Andrew Gelman and Deborah Nolan (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Event TV / Critical Thinking Questions

• The connection I made between social media (especially Twitter) and “event” TV comes from “Twitter and TV: How Social Media Is Helping Out Old Media,” an essay by James Poniewozik in the March 22, 2010, issue of Time.
• Here’s my post about critical thinking questions in my recent cryptography course.
• Here’s my post about how to adapt Rob MacDougall’s “counterfactual questions” for use with clickers.
• The terms absolutist, relativist, and evaluative come from this article: Kuhn, D. (1992). Thinking as argument. Harvard Education Review 62(2), 155–178.  Similar ideas are found in the work of William Perry and others, captured well in this essay by Richard Felder.

Volunteerism

• I heard about Ushahidi on the World’s Tech Podcast #274, a production of BBC’s The World.  Here are the current Ushahidi reports from Haiti.
• I also heard about Matter of Trust‘s efforts to collect hair and nylons to make hair booms in the World’s Tech Podcast, episode 287.  I highly recommend the World’s Tech Podcast (hosted by Clark Boyd) as a way to learn about “undercovered” tech news.
• The Alphachimp Studio blog has some information on how graphic designers in Nashville have been responding to the recent floods here.  My “We Are Nashville” t-shirt comes from Cool People Care.  And it was Hands on Nashville that’s done a tremendous job of coordinating volunteer efforts in town.

For more on the notion of a participatory culture, read Henry Jenkins’ white paper, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” [PDF].  Also, here’s my blog post that got me started thinking along these lines, the one that references the Campt and Freeman article.

What are your thoughts on the ideas in my keynote?  Do we, especially our students, live in a participatory culture?  What consequences does that have for how we teach?

Image: “skates” by Flickr user marythom / Creative Commons licensed

More from my round-up of articles on clickers in the health professions…

Reference: Kenwright, K. (2009). Clickers in the classroom. TechTrends, 53(1), 74-77.

Notes: This short paper from Kathy Kenwright (University of Tennessee Health Science Center) serves as a concise introduction to teaching with clickers, complete with a brief review of the literature.  As with Cain and Robinson (2008), the lit review isn’t comprehensive, but Kenwright does a good job of discussing the major benefits of clickers in the context of reported studies.  Most of her observations are not specific to any one discipline.  For example, she notes that clickers facilitate formative assessment of student learning, as well as agile teaching.  She mentions the importance of the display of results of a clicker question and the use of clickers to facilitate in-class quizzes on pre-class readings.

I have concerns about a couple of Kenwright’s recommendations, however.  She notes that many students in the health professions must pass national board exams, and uses this to support her claim that one shouldn’t ask too many clicker questions during class.

Asking too many questions during the lecture leaves less time to convey important content.  In a curriculum such as the Clinical Laboratory Science program, there is a defined body of knowledge that must be delivered to the students.

She’s speaking of a coverage model of education here, which is problematic, as I’ve mentioned here before.  I would argue that since students will be required to excel at the multiple-choice questions seen on these national board exams, they should spend plenty of class time practicing these kinds of questions.  Clicker questions based on these exam questions work well for that.

Kenwright also notes that asking clicker questions “on the fly” during class can take too much class time:

If they are added during class the class will be kept waiting while the instructor is typing in the question and answer choices… There is nothing wrong with reverting to an old-fashioned show of hands, or calling on a particular student for an answer.

Asking “on the fly” questions doesn’t require you to type questions into your clicker system–asking them verbally usually does the trick.  Moreover, if there was nothing wrong with a show of hands, there wouldn’t be any reason to use clickers to begin with.  Why are clickers better than a show of hands?  Because students don’t answer questions independently when you go with a show of hands (Stowell and Nelson, 2007).

What’s your view on the coverage issue?  Is a lot of active learning possible in health professions education?

Image: “Stethoscope” by Flickr user vitualis / Creative Commons licensed

Back in January I gave a keynote talk at the Health Professionals Education Research Symposium hosted by Nova Southeastern University.  Part of my preparation for that talk included reading some of the articles from related disciplines in my clickers bibliography.  Shortly after the conference, I blogged about one great article about using clickers to promote critical thinking in nursing (Debourgh, 2008), and I’ve been meaning to post some notes about the other articles I read.  Let’s get started…

Reference: Cain, J., & Robinson, E. (2008). A primer on audience response systems: Current applications and future considerations. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 72(4), 77.

Notes: The literature review is the highlight of this article.  It’s not as comprehensive as other lit reviews, but it does a great job of describing a few studies of the use of clickers in the health professions with particularly positive results.  For example, Slain et al. (2004) report that students in clicker sections of two pharmacy courses scored significantly higher on exams than students in non-clickers sections.  Similar results were found by Schackow et al. (2004) in classes for family medicine residents and by Pradhan, Sparano, and Ananth (2005) in classes for obstetrics and gynecology residents.  These references are listed in my bibliography.  Hopefully, I’ll find some time to read and blog about them soon.

Cain and Robinson also include a useful exploration of some of the logistical aspects of teaching with clickers.  Instead of making recommendations, they describe the various choices a department might make and their pros and cons.  They note that any clickers initiative should make sense given an institutions teaching philosophy and technology plan.

For example, a pharmacy school with a mandatory laptop program may highly value an ARS that can utilize laptops as response devices, rather than basing the decision on other features.

They also recommend purchasing a set of clickers available to faculty and staff to check out for one-shot events, like continuing education programs and faculty meetings.

The section on recommendations for future research is a strong one.  Cain and Robinson write, “Any effects from using an instructional medium do not come from the use of the media itself, but from the instructional methods employed.”  That’s something I’ve argued here before.  Cain and Robinson call for research that explores the effects of very particular instructional strategies involving clickers, including strategies useful for facilitating discussion about matters of ethics and morality.  While ethical issues are present in every discipline, they are often particularly important in professional education.

Cain and Robinson make an interesting statement in their section on student considerations: “Finally, appropriate application of the ARS in the curriculum should be defined and encouraged.”  I understand the interest in encouraging instructors to use clickers in appropriate ways.  It’s the “defining” piece that makes me wonder if pharmacy education is a bit more top-down than the kinds of programs you find in, say, colleges of arts and science.  I find that faculty members in undergraduate liberal arts departments tend to have a high degree of autonomy when it comes to their teaching decisions.  They might not be comfortable having appropriate uses of clickers “defined” for them.  Am I reading too much into this word choice?  Does your department (whatever your discipline) set policy on educational technology use?

Image: “Rx, San Antonio, TX” by Flickr user Tadson / Creative Commons licensed