Last month I blogged about a new product (then in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief.  This product allows multiple students to interact with a PowerPoint slide projected on the big screen in a classroom.  Each student needs his or her own wireless mouse to do so.  Each student has a unique cursor on the big screen, allowing them to respond to clicker-style multiple-choice questions embedded in PowerPoint slides.  Check out the video below.

As I noted in my earlier post, this system has a very significant flaw as a replacement for a “traditional” clicker system.  Since students can see how their peers are responding to questions, it’s impossible for students to respond independently.  That means that many students will likely wait to see how their peers respond before jumping on the bandwagon and selecting the most popular answer.

Mouse Mischief is now out of beta, and a colleague sent me a link to the above video.  Now that I’ve seen the promotional video, I’m starting to see more potential in Mouse Mischief.  Not as a replacement for clickers–my earlier concern about independent voting still stands–but as a way to allow students to interact with text and images shared with the class.  Imagine sharing a portion of reading with students and having them take turns highlighting quotes that support a particular argument, with each student discussing his or her quote with the class.  Or showing students a complex medical diagnostic image and having them take turns circling abnormalities and sharing possible causes for or effects of those abnormalities.

Given how the system works, having students respond simultaneously to questions doesn’t make much sense.  However, having students interact with text or images in sequence has some real potential.  There are other ways to implement these kinds of activities–having students take turns coming up to the instructor’s computer or interactive white board or having students use laptops to log in to the same Google Doc–but in some teaching contexts, Mouse Mischief might be a very practical option.

What do you think?  Do you see applications for this kind of tool in your classrooms?

Image: “Wireless Mouse” by Flickr user kengo / Creative Commons licensed

I was looking over my notes from the 2010 Health Professions Educational Research Symposium (HPERS) hosted back in January by Nova Southeastern University, and I was reminded of a couple of interesting points Jim Vanides of Hewlett-Packard made in his closing keynote.  Jim had shared several fascinating ways that educators receiving HP grants have been making use of tablet PCs in the classroom.  I had been familiar with ways in which laptops are often used in the classroom, but I hadn’t heard as much about uses for tablet PCs.

Jim described several examples in which the “digital ink” that tablets provide through their stylus interfaces played key educational roles.  For example, students in an engineering class can draw or design various diagrams on their tablet PCs, then send those to the instructor to be shared and discussed with the whole class.  Sure, students could prepare their diagrams before class for sharing, but sometimes having students work on “deliverables” during class–when the instructor and fellow students are around to provide feedback during the design process–is advantageous.

During the Q&A after Jim’s keynote, I asked him a question I’ve posed here on the blog several times: If students are submitting responses to free-response questions during class, how can an instructor process and use 20 or 30 or more student responses in a timely fashion during class?  With multiple-choice clicker questions, the bar chart is the perfect way to display the results.  How to handle free-response questions?

Jim made two very good points in response to my question:

1. Since humans process visual information very quickly, having students submit diagrams, drawings, photographs, and other visual responses means instructors can often make sense of dozens of student responses very quickly during class–more quickly than with textual responses.  As a big fan of using visual thinking tools in my work, I really liked this answer!  It also argues for using devices with touch interfaces, like tablets and smart phones, as part of classroom response systems used with open-ended questions.  (Jim also noted that in science, engineering, and mathematics, where people often think with pencils in hand, digital ink can be very useful.)
2. Instructors practicing the “usual” version of peer instruction, in which students respond to a clicker question on their own, then discuss it with peers, then vote again, can start processing student responses to open-ended questions during the peer discussion phase–while students are engaged in talking with each other.  This gives the instructor a little more time to make sense of student responses and decide how to discuss them with the class.  This is not unlike taking a “backchannel break” during class in which students brainstorm questions in small groups and submit them to the instructor via backchannel.  (I used this approach in a recent workshop on lecturing.)

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m very excited by the educational possibilities of having a class full of students with Web-enabled, app-enabled, touch-screen devices.  I was glad to hear a few new and very useful ideas on this topic from Jim at the HPERS Conference.  I think it’s often helpful to hear from people somewhat out of the usual academic circles I run in for great new ideas!

Image: “40+86 Tablet” by Flickr user bark

Gardner Campbell and two of his Baylor University colleagues, librarian Ellen Filgo and first-year student Alexis Tracy, presented a talk at the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) conference on their use of Twitter in Gardner’s first-year seminar course on new media.  The talk, “Twitter Symbiosis: A Librarian, a Hashtag, and a First-Year Seminar,” is online (video + slides) thanks to ELI, which meant I could “attend” the presentation in spite of the fact that I didn’t go to the ELI conference.  I recently posted nine uses for backchannel in education, and Gardner’s talk provides another great example of the potential of Twitter-facilitated backchannel conversations in college teaching.

In a nutshell, here’s how Gardner incorporated Twitter in his course: As part of their class participation, Gardner’s students were encouraged to open Twitter accounts and participate in backchannel discussion on Twitter during class sessions, using a course-specific hashtag to make their tweets easy to find and follow.  Moreover, Ellen Filgo, a university librarian, participated in the Twitterstream, too, although she did not attend class sessions in general.  Instead, she followed the Twitter conversation from her office (by loading a column in her Tweetdeck application that searched for the course hashtag) and contributed resources and ideas to the backchannel discussion.

How did Gardner and his students use the backchannel?  I’ll use my “nine uses” as a framework here.  Gardner’s students engaged in notetaking, sharing resources with each other, commenting on the class discussion and presentations given by Gardner and by fellow students, asking questions of Gardner and each other, and helping one another by suggesting answers to those questions.  Also, Gardner was intentional about using the backchannel and other mechanisms (including student blogs “fed” into a course “mother blog” and social bookmarking via Delicious) to build community in his course.

Perhaps what is most interesting about this example is that the inclusion of librarian Ellen Filgo served to open the classroom to those not physically present.  In the talk, Ellen describes her participation in the backchannel as “librarian jazz,” referring to the improvisational quality of her interactions with the students.  She knew the topic of each class session’s conversation, but didn’t always have the readings ahead of time and couldn’t hear the verbal conversation in the room.  This meant that she had to suggest resources and answers to student questions based entirely on the Twitterstream in real time.  In the ELI talk, both Ellen and Gardner referred to “agile” teaching, one of my favorite terms, which made me smile!

Ellen noted that one positive outcome of this participation was that she was involved in the students’ research work at a much earlier point in that work than is typical for her work with students.  She was thus able to assist students in valuable ways, and the students’ understanding of the role of the library in their work was enhanced.

If you watch the talk online, be sure to listen to Gardner’s student, Alexis Tracy, describe her experiences in the course.  Using social media (Twitter, blogs, social bookmarking) in an academic setting was new to her, and she became very interested in Twitter in particular.  She’s remarkably reflective and well-spoken about the impact the backchannel had on her learning in the course.  I was impressed that she described herself as an “epistemologist”–that’s a word I didn’t learn until graduate school!

Here are a few other points that Gardner and his colleagues make in their talk:

• It’s important to use a course-specific hashtag.  That makes finding class tweets easy and helps to create a sense of community.
• Be sure to archive the class tweets using a service like Twapper Keeper which creates a permanent archive of all tweets using a particular hashtag.  They didn’t do this and regretted it later when they discovered that Twitter’s search function doesn’t go that far back.
• Gardner’s students all gave class presentations.  During the presentations, the other students participated in the backchannel as usual.  This provided a useful source of feedback to the presenting students, who would frequently read through those tweets after class.  I’m tempted to call this a “tenth” use of backchannel.  It falls under the category of students helping one another, but when the student being helped is the presenter, this use is, in a way, more significant.
• Near the end of the talk, Gardner says, “If you want your students to tweet well, then you need to tweet well.”  If not, that is, if you ask your students to engage in an activity in which you yourself do not engage, your students are likely to view it as busywork and not view it as a valuable learning activity.  Gardner has enough experience blogging and having his students blog that I consider this sound advice.

See the online archive of the talk for other points, including Gardner’s approach to grading backchannel participation, a great anecdote about how a question moved from the backchannel to the frontchannel, and some warnings about what can go wrong when students aren’t prepared well for this kind of participation.  Thanks to Gardner, Ellen, and Alexis for sharing their experiences with this very new form of classroom interaction!

I wanted to share some additional thoughts on Cliff Atkinson’s new book, The Backchannel, and its implications for higher education.  As I mentioned in my earlier post, the first chapter of the book is available online and provides a very clear introduction to the logistics and possibilities of the backchannel.  What might the backchannel look like in educational settings?  Here are a couple of examples.

“The Twitter Experiment,” a five-minute YouTube video, shows how UT-Dallas history professor Monica Rankin used Twitter to facilitate a backchannel discussion.  In her case, she had a somewhat large class that she broke into smaller discussion groups.  The students were encouraged to post their thoughts on Twitter during the small-group discussion time.  The Twitterstream was displayed on the big screen for the whole class to see.  This led to some “cross-fertilization” of small-group discussions as ideas generated by one group were read and discussed by other groups.  Dr. Rankin also had a TA monitor the backchannel, responding to student questions and surfacing important points for Dr. Rankin to discuss with the entire class from time to time during the class session.  For more details on Dr. Rankin’s use of Twitter, see my earlier post on this topic.

Purdue University has developed a system called Hotseat that facilitates backchannel discussion.  This system allows students to contribute to the backchannel in a variety of ways, including Twitter and Facebook.  The student contributes are typically displayed on a big screen for the entire class to see, and the instructor typically takes a “Hotseat break” of sorts every now and then to respond to the questions raised in the backchannel.  Students can comment on other students’ posts and they can “vote up” comments or questions their peers post so that instructors have an easier time identifying the most pressing topics.  The Purdue team shared their work on Hotseat at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative earlier today, and, according to Twitter user @eyb, who “live-tweeted” the presentation, students really liked the system.  They didn’t necessarily think it helped them learn better, but they liked it and they wanted their instructors to spend more time responding to the questions raised in the backchannel.

(I’ve been meaning to talk about Hotseat here on the blog for a while now.  Thanks to @eyb for some great reporting at ELI!  I feel I have a much better sense of the system now, technologically and pedagogically.)

What are some other ways that backchannel might function in educational settings?  Cliff Atkinson describes some common and uncommon uses of the backchannel in Chapter 3 of his book.  Here are my thoughts on how Atkinson’s uses might map over to educational settings:

• Notetaking: Students can take their notes during a class in the backchannel.  This provides an electronic (and thus searchable) set of notes for the student.  Moreover, students can read and use each other’s notes more easily.  You might even select two or three students each day to be official class note-takers, freeing other students up for more engagement in class.
• Sharing Resources: Students can also look online (or, call me crazy, in their textbooks) for information that supplements the lecture or class discussion.  It’s easy to share links in the backchannel thanks to all the URL shortening services, and students can be very good at finding useful and relevant information online.  And if a resource shared by a student isn’t useful or relevant, it creates an opportunity to discuss with students how to find and evaluate online information resources.
• Commenting: Students can also comment on the ideas being share or discussed in class.  Just providing a visible venue for student comments is likely to encourage more students to reflect actively during class.  Plus, students can read and respond to each others’ reflections.  Sure, students can contribute to online discussions after class, but there’s something exciting about having more students engage in discussions during class–more than just those who are bold enough and quick enough to contribute verbally.
• Amplifying: The Hotseat feature mentioned above that allows students to “vote up” peer comments they find important is an example of what Atkinson calls “amplifying what others are saying.”  On Twitter, this happens via retweeting: If a comment is retweeted frequently, then many people find it interesting enough to share.  Google Moderator is a free service that works similarly–students can post questions and others can vote them up or down.  This kind of feature is a great way to handle the problem I’ve identified here on the blog several times: It’s really hard for an instructor to follow and make sense of the backchannel during class given the open-ended nature of the comments.  Giving the students the ability to identify more or less relevant comments is one way to help with this.  (Monica Rankin’s use of a moderator–her TA–is another.)
• Asking Questions: I’ve put this a few spots down the list since I think it’s a more obvious use of the backchannel than some of the ones listed above.  Backchannel provides students an additional way to ask questions.  Students are frequently hesitant to ask questions in class for a variety of mostly social reasons–they don’t want to look “dumb” in front of their instructor or their peers.  Anonymous backchannel discussions make it extremely easy for these students to surface their questions.  Even when students are identified on the backchannel, having a venue where questions are encouraged is likely to make it easier for students to share questions.  And if the backchannel includes an amplification tool, then students can support each others’ question-asking very directly.
• Helping One Another: Keep in mind that there are several kinds of backchannel conversations, including student-to-student conversations.  When one student poses a question on the backchannel, another student might very well answer that question before the instructor can get to it.  This kind of peer instruction is a common use of clickers, and it can work well in the backchannel, too.
• Offering Suggestions: The backchannel can give students a voice in where a class discussion goes.  Students can suggest discussion topics or questions.  They can also suggest useful readings, activities, or topics for subsequent classes.  They can provide instructors with feedback on what’s working and what’s not from their perspective.  Many instructors have students complete a “minute paper” at the end of each class in which students identify the most important point of the day or ask a question.  The backchannel allows instructors to gather this kind of feedback whenever students are ready to share it during class.
• Building Community: Particularly in large classes, it can be hard for students to get to know more than just the few students they sit near.  Backchannel discussions can help students get to know each other in a variety of ways.  I would argue that it’s important for students to have avatars or icons attached to their backchannel posts, preferably photos of themselves.  Seeing someone’s face along with their comments and their name helps build actual, not just virtual community.
• Opening the Classroom: Some backchannels are private; that is, only the instructor and students can see or participate in the backchannel conversation.  Others, like Twitter, are public, allowing those outside the classroom to participate in the discussion.  This provides an opportunity to open the class discussion to those not currently enrolled in the course–students taking other courses, students who took the course in the past, academic experts at other institutions, and more.  These external people have the potential to learn from and contribute to the backchannel discussion.

That was fun thinking through these options!  You can have fun, too: What did I miss?  Comments or suggestions for the uses I’ve listed above?

Cliff Atkinson, author of Beyond Bullet Points, has a new book out, The Backchannel, from New Riders Press (publishers of Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen).  I’ve discussed the use of backchannel in the past, and I consider backchannel technology to be part of the more general category of classroom response systems.  I just finished reading The Backchannel, which focuses primarily on backchannel use in business and conference settings, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the book and what those of us in educational contexts might learn from it.

First, a little definitional work.  The term backchannel refers to three kinds of conversations that usually don’t occur in traditional one-to-many lectures or presentations.  I call backchannel type 1 the conversation that occurs among students or audience members.  This kind of backchannel has been around forever, but until the advent of laptops, netbooks, and smart phones, it was usually limited to whispering to your neighbor and passing notes.

I use backchannel type 2 to refer to the feedback that students or audience members provide to an instructor or presenter.  This, too, has been around forever, in the form of brief Q&A interchanges between the person at the podium and those in the seats, but now with services like Twitter and Hotseat, students and audience members can share their thoughts with instructors and presenters in very different ways.

There is a third kind of backchannel that’s distinctly different from types 1 and 2.  Traditionally, the only participants in a lecture or presentation were the people in the room at the time.  However, Twitter, blogs, and other social media tools allow conversations to extend beyond the physical room.  Presenters and audience members alike can share ideas, questions, and resources with people outside the room following the conversation virtually through social media.  And those virtual participants can interact with those in the room by sharing ideas and resources and asking questions of those in the room.

In his book, Atkinson describes very clearly the roles these three different kinds of backchannel can play in a lecture or presentation, illustrating his points with many examples of backchannel uses both successful and unsuccessful at recent national conferences.  The first chapter, available online, is a particularly easy-to-follow introduction to backchannel technology (Twitter, in particular) as well as questions, concerns, and opportunities that backchannel presents for those at the front of the room.  If you’re not sure what all the buzz about Twitter and backchannel is all about (and you’re still reading this post!), then I recommend you read through Atkinson’s first chapter.  It’s a great starting point for understanding the logistics and dynamics of backchannel.

Subsequent chapters provide a step-by-step guide to getting started with Twitter, explorations of the risks and rewards of backchannel, and Atkinson’s recommendations for making the most of backchannel before, during, and after a presentation, including advice for handling an “unruly” backchannel.  This last advice is accompanied by an examination of how social media expert Chris Brogan “tamed” a rough backchannel conversation at a conference last September.

As noted, Atkinson does a great job of explaining backchannel and its potential for good and for bad.  He also presents several useful “what would you do?” scenarios throughout the book, asking the readers to put themselves in the shoes of a particular presenter, moderator, or audience member.  The book is written in an informal, engaging style, with helpful images, screenshots, and diagrams throughout.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking and blogging about the backchannel, and I still took away several interesting, useful, practical tips from Atkinson’s book about managing backchannel conversations.

My primary criticism of Atkinson’s book is that he is a little too prescriptive with his advice.  I know that every instructor’s teaching context is different–different institution, different students, different topics, different teaching strength, and so on–so I tried in my book on teaching with clickers to describe a variety of options for teaching with clickers, along with pros and cons for those options, so that readers might decide for themselves what teaching choices to make.  Atkinson does a little of that in his book, but for the most part he tells the reader what they should do when leveraging the backchannel.  I respect his expertise on this subject, but there were several times while reading the book that I could easily imagine presenting or teaching contexts in which his recommendations would not work well.

I took about 15 pages of handwritten notes as I was reading The Backchannel, and I plan to write more about the book, particularly its implications for those of us educational settings.  In the meantime, I’ll end with two quotes from the book.  The first one is found on page 31 and addresses the educational context:

Some educators have been experimenting with using Twitter and other social media technologies to introduce a backchannel to the classroom, a practice that has generated intense criticism from those who see it as a threat to traditional lecture formats and established pedagogy.

The second one makes clear what Atkinson thinks about this debate and is one of several times Atkinson argues that the rise of the backchannel will fundamentally change the world of presentations:

The traditional lecture format, bullet point slides, and post-presentation Q&A session are becoming dinosaurs in this fast-moving world.  Each of these social tools has offered some efficiency or benefit that was appropriate for the time, but times are radically changing, and it is time for these methods to evolve into new ones that are a better fit for our needs.

What do you think?  With mobile computing identified in the 2010 Horizon Report as an emerging technology likely to have a significant impact on campuses in the next one or two years, what role do you see for backchannel in college and university teaching in the near future?

Maybe this is obvious to others, but I hadn’t thought of this particular use of numeric-response clicker questions, shared with me by a humanities professor recently: In a class that deals with history, ask students to identify the year in which a particular event happened using a numeric-response clicker question.

This question type is typically used in math and science classes to have students respond with their answers to open-ended computational questions, but it can just as easily be used in a humanities class to have students respond with dates (e.g. 1776, 2010).  Sure, one could ask students to respond to a multiple-choice date question, but the free-response format might surface some wrong answers you wouldn’t predict.

This kind of question isn’t limited to events, of course.  You could also ask students to identify the year a piece of literature was written or an artwork was created.  This type of question need not be a factual recall question, either.  You could present to students a piece of art, for instance, they haven’t likely seen before and ask them to analyze the artwork and estimate when it was created.

Some classroom response systems allow you to set a range for the correct answer to a numeric-response question.  With that feature, you could give students a little wiggle room in their answers (“To within 5 years, in what year did X occur?”) or have them respond to the nearest decade.

(By the way, I’ve just signed up for the twitterfeed service, so a tweet about this post should automatically appear in my Twitter stream in the next hour.  Fingers crossed!)

There were a lot of mentions on Twitter the other day of the recent Campus Technology article “Fostering Classroom Interaction, Minus the Clickers.” The article describes a Web application called LectureTools developed by Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric, ocean, and space sciences at the University of Michigan.  In a nutshell, LectureTools is a suite of tools designed to support active learning, including clicker-like survey and quiz tools, PowerPoint sharing and annotation tools, a backchannel (student-to-instructor) tool, and a podcast tool.  These tools are useful outside of class, but they are even more useful during class, provided one’s students all have laptops and WiFi connections.

It’s clear that Samson has put a lot of time and effort in developing this suite of tools and that he’s had success in using it to enhance his classroom dynamic.  The functions accomplished by these tools can be accomplished in other ways, of course, but LectureTools integrates these functions, which likely has some value for students and instructors.

Here’s what caught my attention in the Campus Technology article:

“Where on this weather map do you expect it’s going to rain today?” Dr. Perry Samson asks the 200 students in his introductory class on extreme weather. Almost instantly, dots begin to appear on the displayed map, as students indicate their answers through their wireless laptops. In moments, a clear pattern emerges on the classroom display as Samson continues the lecture.

That’s a kind of free-response question that I haven’t seen before!  I really like the idea of sending an image to students’ laptop screens (or smart phone screens, for that matter), letting them mark it up somehow, and then displaying an aggregation of students’ markups on the big screen for the whole class to see.  That would seem to set the stage for a productive class discussion, one informed by patterns in the student responses.

Samson calls this kind of question an “image-based question.” I might call it a “placemark question,” after the little virtual push-pins one can use to mark locations in Google Earth.  This kind of question would be particularly useful, I think, in earth, oceanic, and atmospheric science courses, although any course in which students analyze images or graphics might find this question type useful.

LectureTools is another example of a classroom response system in which the response devices aren’t clickers.  These more general classroom response systems have a lot of potential, in part because of the greater flexibility in the nature of student responses.  See my last post for a different (and hypothetical) classroom response system with potential use in literature courses.

One more thing: This probably goes without saying, but I’m not opposed to the use of clicker-based classroom response systems!  Multiple-choice questions can be incredibly useful, sometimes in ways that surprise those who consider them limiting.  Also, many clicker systems are very simple and easy to use, which is a plus for many instructors.  I don’t know how easy or hard LectureTools is to use, but I know some instructors prefer simple, single-use systems to complex, integrated systems.  You’ll need to consider what kinds of technologies work best for you.

A couple of weeks ago, Stephanie Chasteen posted a series of blog entries on her ScienceGeekGirl blog from an American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) conference.  One entry describes a session she attended that focused on interactive lecture demonstrations in physics courses.  If you’ll think back to a physics or chemistry course you’ve taken, you can probably remember a class session or two in which your instructor performed some kind of demonstration at the front of the classroom.  Research data shared at the AAPT session indicate that students learn a lot more from these demos when they do more than just watch them.  Having students interact with the demo somehow increases learning.

One way to have students interact with a lecture demo is to have them respond to a clicker question that asks them to predict the outcome of the demo.  This helps create a “time for telling” about the demo, particularly if most students predict incorrectly.  Since the students have thought about the demo and have committed to their prediction, when that prediction turns out to be incorrect, the students are ready (cognitively and affectively) to hear an explanation of the demo.

One of the presenters shared an interesting result.  Stephanie writes:

However, the learning gains don’t seem quite as high when they use clickers.  They conjecture that the clickers don’t require students do actually do ray tracing, etc., as much as when they don’t have clickers.  (My thought on that is that you shouldn’t present the clicker answer choices until they’ve done the ray tracing and other cognitive work required to arrive at an answer).

Stephanie’s suggestion would, I think, be echoed by Jennifer Imazeki, the economics instructor I blogged about recently, who takes that very approach with some of her clicker questions.

Stephanie also writes that one of the presenters at the AAPT session, David Sokoloff, is “looking for people who would like to use some of their clicker interactive lecture demonstration.”  Email him at sokoloff at uoregon dot edu if you’re interested.

Jennifer Imazeki teaches a 500-student microeconomics course at San Diego State University, and she recently blogged about her use of clickers in this course.  In her post, she describes some advantages of campus standardization, her grading scheme, and her students’ (generally positive) response to learning with clickers.  She also describes a couple of teaching choices she’s made that I find particularly interesting.

Last semester, I also made a quiz available on Blackboard that students could take if they missed class; I take the higher of their clicker score or quiz score for a given day.

Imazeki notes that by giving her students the option of taking an online quiz, she minimizes the number of students who show up to class just to get their participation points.  Since these students are often somewhat disruptive in class, this works out well for the students who attend class while also giving Imazeki a way to keep tabs on the students who don’t attend class.

Imazeki also describes her use of the “pick-a-random-student-who-responded” feature of her classroom response system.

I tend to use this when I have asked the class to brainstorm examples or asked them a question that doesn’t really have a ‘wrong’ answer. Although students don’t love it, they don’t seem to hate it either.

As I’ve mentioned before, this feature can help prevent cheating with clickers (one student responding with an absent student’s clicker).  In a class of 500 students, it also offers a useful way to “cold call” students without having them feel like they’ve been singled out.

Imazeki also notes that she’ll have students draft responses to an open-ended question, then display a clicker question with preset answer choices.  Students are then asked to select the answer choice that matches their draft response.  With graphing questions such as the one she notes as an example (“Use a supply and demand graph to show what happens to price and quantity if X happens”), this approach seems particularly useful since drawing the right graph is a harder task than selecting the right graph from a set of options.

In a subsequent blog post, Jennifer Imazeki shares more results from a survey of her students about her use of clickers.  She notes what percentage of her students agreed with a variety of statements about the positive impact of clickers.  Then she writes:

The percentage agreeing with these statements has risen each of the three semesters I’ve taught the large lecture and the percentage disagreeing has fallen.

I think this is an important point.  Often when we try something new in our teaching, it doesn’t work out as well as we would like.  We haven’t really figured out how to make it work, and the students are used to it either.  Sometimes a teacher trying out something new and receiving poor feedback from her students gives up the innovation and reverts to her previous teaching methods.  However, as Imazeki’s data show, our use of instructional techniques can improve over time with practice and feedback.

(I’ve just noticed that this is the first time I’ve blogged about using clickers in the discipline of economics.  I have a couple of economics examples in my book, however, and I’ve heard from several economics instructors, including ones who teach very large classes like the one described here, that clickers can work very well in their discipline.)