There’s a lively discussion happening on the POD Network listserv this week on teaching large classes. The discussion detoured into a discussion of teaching with clickers. In responding to one of these posts, Louis Schmier wrote:

“Well, Ron, clickers might get feedback and active and collaborative involvement, but learning? Technology is a tool, not a panecea. The basic problem with large class as Ron defines it, is that it violates the basic Aristotelian tenet of KNOWING those in your audience and tailoring yourself so that those in the audience get it, understand it, and retain it.”

This comment struck me as interesting, so I responded to it on the listserv. I’m including my response here on the blog (with a couple of extra links for clarity), in case those not on the listserv find it helpful.

Anton [Tolman] has responded very eloquently to Louis’ concerns about classroom response systems, but I can’t resist weighing in myself. First, there’s plenty of evidence that “active and collaborative involvement” often leads to student learning, so if clickers are indeed fostering more student engagement during class, that sets the stage for more student learning.

And as for the idea of “KNOWING those in your audience and tailoring yourself so that those in the audience get it, understand it, and retain it,” once you get past 15-20 students, it becomes very difficult to do those two things—assessing your students’ learning during class and practicing “agile teaching” by responding to what you find out about their learning on the fly–without a tool like a classroom response system. In fact, these are two teaching tasks that clickers are incredibly well-suited to support.

Imagine you have a single student in your office asking for help in your course. It’s relatively easy to “diagnose” that student and get a sense of what the student understands and doesn’t understand, then to tailor some one-on-one instruction to help the student resolve his or her misunderstandings. If you have 2-3 students in an office hour setting, you can probably do the same thing, although you’re already juggling 2-3 different “private universes” at this point, which can be challenging.

When you move to the “small” class setting, say, 8-10 students, you now have 8-10 “private universes” to try to uncover and respond to. Sure, there could be some similarities among your students in terms of their prior experiences, misunderstandings, and perspectives on course material, but you’ve still got 8-10 different students to build your learning environment in response to. Given 50 or 75 minutes and plenty of discussion, you’ve got a good shot at this, however.

Now move to a bigger class, say 15-20 students. At this point, it’s tough to have enough “air time” for all the students during class. This makes the juggling of “private universes” very challenging. Small group discussions can help (outsourcing some of this work to the students themselves), as can pre-class assignments. But during class, you’ve got quite a task if you want to be responsive to all your students’ various learning needs.

(Here you have my answer to Jeanette [McDonald]‘s question. When is large large? I would say 15-20 students. At that point the dynamics shift in very significant ways.)

Now imagine more students—30, 50, 100, or 500. The challenge of responding to that many unique “private universes” is truly daunting! You have to start making some assumptions about commonalities among those private universes. Clickers are wonderful tools for getting a sense of the validity of those assumptions! You pose a multiple-choice question where the answers are crafted to tie into what you suppose are common understandings (correct or not) and perceptions about the topic at hand, you have the students think about (and maybe discuss in small groups) the question, then you poll them and find out which of the understandings and perceptions are *really* the most common.

The resulting bar chart tells you how to spend the next 5-20 minutes of class time: responding to the student views of the topic that are most common. This “agile teaching” allows you to make the best use of limited class time by responding to as many “private universes” as you can in the time available.

Some caveats: You could miss a very common student understanding or perspective completely when you write your clicker question! The more experience you have with the topic and with students learning about the topic, the less likely this is to happen, but it’s still something to watch out for. That’s why it’s helpful to have some kind of classwide discussion about the question, giving students whose views aren’t represented in the bar chart a chance to share.

You also won’t get to the “long tail” of student views this way. What about the two students in a class of 100 who voted for option D? Will you have time to address that minority view? Maybe not during class, but perhaps after class in some fashion.

I’m also assuming here that you’re teaching a large class! The debate over whether or not classes should have 100 students is secondary to my point here. My point is that *given* a large class, a classroom response system is an excellent tool for understanding one’s students (in the aggregate) and tailoring one’s instruction to one’s students.

Lots more on these ideas (with examples from real classrooms!) in the “agile teaching” category on my blog.

The discussion on the listerv continued productively from here. It’s worth checking out.

Image: “O is for Occipital Lobe” by Flickr user illuminaut / Creative Commons licensed

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

The summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) wraps up in Portland, Oregon, today. There were several talks on teaching physics with clickers at the meeting, including one by Ian Beatty of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro physics education research group. Ian was the subject of my first podcast interview, and he’s been doing great work helping science instructors at the K12 and post-secondary levels teach effectively with clickers.

In Ian’s presentation, he identified and addressed several common concerns instructors express about teaching with clickers. For each concern, Ian identifies a belief about teaching and/or learning that likely underlies the concern, as well as an alternate belief that can be adopted to address the concern productively. Ian also includes some practical strategies and example clicker questions for each of these alternate beliefs.

For example, when many instructors hear about teaching with clickers, they’re concerned with having sufficient class time to cover what they need to cover in their courses given the time required by having students discuss and respond to clicker questions. Ian notes that this concern is likely a result of the following belief: “I must explicitly address in class everything students will be held accountable for.” Ian then presents an alternate perspective on this idea: “I can use class time to focus on core ideas and big-picture understanding, and charge students with filling in the details outside class.” This alternate perspective is, perhaps, non-intuitive to many instructors, but it’s a reasonable and useful perspective to have. Adopting this perspective leads to a shift from what Ian calls an understanding of class as a place to present content to an understanding of class as a place to help students digest content. Ian then shares five tips and techniques for implementing this shift in the classroom.

Ian addresses other concerns in a similar manner, including concerns about having enough time to write good clicker questions, concerns about poor student participation during class, and concerns about changing one’s teaching style. His visuals, which use the online presentation tool Prezi, are included below and are well worth checking out.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported (briefly) on a new survey from CDW, a “leading provider of technology products and services for business, government, and education,” indicating some differences in how faculty and IT staff view the role of technology in higher education. Here’s what caught my eye from the Chronicle story:

“The most popular tools cited by professors were e-textbooks and online documents, with faculty members reporting far less enthusiasm for other electronic tools. Under a quarter of faculty members surveyed use wikis or blogs in their teaching…”

While I’m an active user of blogs in my courses and I see a lot of value in wikis for student collaboration, the bit about e-textbooks and online documents doesn’t interest me that much. Those two technologies are more about content delivery than interaction. Sure, they have their uses, but they’re not as likely to lead to active learning experiences as more interactive tools.

What bugs me about this Chronicle story is that there’s no mention of classroom response systems. I mentioned this on Twitter, and a couple of people there poked fun at my tweet about this omission. Sure, I’m going to notice whether or not clickers are included in a survey like this. I did write a book about teaching with clickers, after all. However, it’s not that clickers weren’t addressed in the survey. In fact, they were listed right along with many other educational technologies as response options in the survey itself, and the publicly available report from CDW notes that 34% of institutions support the use of clickers by faculty. (More on that statistic below.)

I think what bothers me is that clickers rarely seem to rate a mention in stories like the Chronicle‘s on educational technology. Sure, e-book readers are all the rage these days and there are plenty of people in academia talking about the potential of e-textbooks. Blogs and wikis get a lot of attention, too, which is great since they are useful tools for fostering out-of-class interactions among students. But what about technologies that enhance the in-class experience for students? Yeah, I know I’m biased, but those are the technologies that I see as having the greatest potential to have a positive impact on higher ed. Why? Because what happens during class still looks a lot like it did 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. There’s great potential for growth there, and in-class, interactive technologies like classroom response systems can be a big part of that.

Back to the survey: Only 34% of IT professionals surveyed indicated that they support faculty use of clickers? That seems low to me, given that it seems that every campus I hear about has at least a couple of faculty members teaching with clickers. Perhaps at many of those places, that’s all there is: a couple of faculty members using clickers without any formal IT support. That would explain the 34% statistic.

This bothers me, too, particularly when, according to the CDW survey, 59% of IT professionals consider lecture capture technologies “essential” to the 21st century classroom. That’s just more content delivery. It doesn’t do much to increase student engagement and interaction. Yes, it’s true that students who know they can watch a lecture after class might take fewer notes and have more mental bandwith for paying attention and engaging during class. And lecture capture tools that allow students to collaboratively mark-up and share lectures after class have a lot of potential for outside-of-class interaction and learning. But why not put some more support behind a technology like clickers that’s designed to support formative assessment and student engagement during class?

Image: “Overhead Projectors at US Grant High School in Oklahoma City” by Flickr user Wesley Fryer / Creative Commons licensed. I’ve been wanting to use this image for a while now. What we consider an essential classroom technology one year can be a recycling challenge the next!

Over on the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching blog, my Vanderbilt colleague Isabel Gauthier, professor of psychology, has shared her experiences asking her students to write their own clicker questions. I met with Isabel a few years ago and briefly discussed ways to use clickers in her courses, and she’s really taken the technology (and pedagogy) and run with it. She’s got a great handle on how to have students write their own clicker questions, and I’ve been wanting to share her experiences here on the blog for a while. Here’s her article, in her own words:

It is difficult to write meaningful and discriminative multiple-choice questions that students find clear and fair. Years ago, I met with CFT assistant director Derek Bruff, who gave me useful pointers to perfect this skill. But a side effect of this interaction transformed entirely the way I teach: I learned so much by working on writing better questions, surely my students could learn too! Derek said something like, “You know, some teachers ask their students to generate questions…” This idea took me on a path to use this strategy, cautiously at first, and then more boldly, as the central pedagogical and evaluative strategy in some of my courses, including Brain Damage and Cognition and Principles of Experimental Design.

I teach these courses three days a week. On two of these days each week, I lecture on course material. These lectures are informed by questions about the readings posted online by students and issues that emerge from a hands-on, semester long project I assign my students. On the third day, we use clickers to go through student-generated multiple choice questions.

Each week each student is responsible for turning in a single question on the weeks’ readings. Students use a PowerPoint template to submit their questions which facilitates use of the question in my clicker software, TurningPoint. In the notes area of the slide, each student includes their name, the correct answer, the page(s) that inspired the question, and, optionally, a justification for the correct answer. Before class, I concatenate all the questions in a single file and read them, grading each on a scale of 1 to 5. The grade goes in the notes area, and, in a textbox on the slide, I write comments about the question. This allows me to print the slides as a PDF with student names removed so that all questions and comments can be distributed to students. I then reorder the slides to choose the right mix of questions I want to use in class with the clickers.

This provides me in a single step with my preparation for the next class, an idea of what I need to focus on during my lecture days, an evaluation of each student, and a mechanism for providing students with feedback on their learning. This weekly feedback allows students to realize how difficult it is to write a good question, one that raises an important issue clearly and is appropriately challenging for their peers. Students eventually learn to key in on critical concepts and relationships in the readings and sometimes even go beyond the readings in interesting ways. They take a more active part in their own and their peers’ learning, and their questions keep me focused on what is most challenging for these students at each point in the course.

Each week students answer the best of these questions in class using clickers, accumulating points for their answers using a generous but motivating grading scheme. If there’s controversy over the correct answer to a question, the class can decide to eliminate a question or to accept multiple answers as correct, provoking interesting discussions. As needed, I can lecture for a few minutes, but issues are generally clarified in class discussion. Questions are used anonymously in class, but students want their question to be picked and use wit and humor to this effect, making the experience more enjoyable for everyone.

This method completely replaces any exams I used to give: They are no longer needed since my students now share the responsibility to evaluate their own learning throughout the semester.

Isabel and her use of clickers were featured on Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 last year. Here’s the video clip:

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…

“Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Perceptions of Clicker Use in their College Mathematics Course,” Travis K. Miller, Millersville University of Pennsylvania [Slides]

In my last post, I mentioned that Janet White first used clickers in her courses for pre-service teachers at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Another speaker in the contributed paper session back in January was her colleague, Travis Miller, who shared results of a student survey he conducted in the pre-service teacher course he taught. Travis used clickers for only six lessons during that course in each of the four sections he was teaching. His clicker questions weren’t graded, and he followed the “classic” peer instruction model each time, having students vote individually, then discuss the question in small groups, then vote again.

Travis’ students overwhelmingly (96%) liked using clickers in the course. Travis mentioned that there are very few things he does as a teacher that are as uniformly popular with his students! Almost as many students (89%) believed that the clicker activities helped them learn the material in those six lessons. Travis drilled down on this, asking students to say why the clickers were useful. The number one answer (59% of students) was that the clicker questions provided students with an opportunity to discuss and think about course content. The number two answer (23%) was that the clickers provided a sense of accountability and involvement.

Travis didn’t stop there, either. He asked his students which topics they understood better because of the clicker activities. Of the six topics that Travis addressed using clickers, sets and Venn diagrams was cited by 52% of the students as the one that most benefited from clickers. Numeration / base arithmetic was a distant second with 15%, and deductive reasoning came in third with 13%. When sharing these data, Travis floated a very interesting hypothesis. He wondered if the fact that the number one topic (sets and Venn diagrams) was a visual one led to the students selecting it as most benefited by clicker questions. I’m a big fan of visual thinking, so this comment caught my attention. Is there something special about peer instruction with clickers and visual thinking?  I’d appreciate your thoughts in the comments.

Travis’ other interesting hypothesis was that his more competitive students liked the competitive aspects of clickers (being the first to answer, answering correctly more frequently than other students, and so on), while the non-competitive students didn’t mind those aspects since they were essentially opt-in. That is, the students who didn’t want to compete could still participate fully with the peer instruction and voting process without feeling any pressure to treat it like a game. Graham, Tripp, Seawright, & Joeckel (2007) found that most students who are hesitant to participate in class liked clickers as well as those who were fine with participating, but I don’t think I’ve seen any research that compared competitive students with non-competitive students. That would make for an interesting research question.

Travis also taught some sections of his pre-service teacher course without using clickers, and he surveyed students in these sections about the potential advantages and drawbacks of using clickers. What concerns did they have about using clickers? They worried about the cost of the devices, that clickers weren’t necessary in small classes, that clicker activities take up too much class time, and that the technology might not be reliable. I found it interesting that these are among the common concerns of faculty members not already using clickers, too!

Image: “Happy Pi Day!” by Flickr user Mykl Roventine / Creative Commons licensed

Hacking the Academy is a project headed up by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.  The idea is to crowdsource an edited volume in a week, which is both innovative and ambitious.  It’s a little unclear how the peer review piece of this will work at this point, but it is clear that there was only a seven-day window for contributions.

I submitted two past blog posts to Hacking the Academy: Clickers, Lecture Capture, and Event Programming (a more conceptual piece) and Backchannel in Education – Nine Uses (a more practical piece).  I wanted to submit something original, as well, so I tried my hand at video production using Jing.  I edited a PowerPoint slide deck I used in a local, face-to-face workshop this spring, then plugged in my USB microphone and recorded a voiceover to go along with the slideshow.

The result is called “Revolution or Evolution? Changing Instructional Practices in the Academy” and you can see it here:

In the video, I compare the “traditional” college lecture format to a vision of the future, one involving all three kinds of backchannel as well as a few Google jockeys.  I argue that helping instructors move from the “traditional” model to this vision of the future will require evolution, not revolution.  One might say, it will require… hacking.

This revolution versus evolution theme is one that I’ll return to this fall at the POD Network conference.  I just found out this week that my proposal for a session on this topic, submitted jointly with Jim Julius of San Diego State University and Dwayne Harapnuik of Abilene Christian University, was approved!  The Hacking the Academy project has started me thinking of ways we can hack this conference session…

Sunday night, I delivered the opening keynote at Central Michigan University’s Great Lakes Conference on Teaching and Learning.  My presentation was titled “Class Time Reconsidered: Motivating Student Participation and Engagement.”  My goal was to share some frameworks and strategies for engaging students in the classroom by taking a few common assumptions about teaching and learning and flipping them on their heads.  Here’s my Prezi, complete with much flipping of things on their heads:

Some thoughts on the presentation:

One of my first clicker questions asked participants to identify a key challenge in motivating students to engage meaningfully during class.  Strangely, the even-numbered answer choices were by far the most popular-students are hesitant to speak up in front of their peers, students focus too much on grades and not enough on learning, and students don’t prepare adequately for class.  These results worked well for me, since I had been planning on addressing ways to reach students who are risk-averse or grade-focused and ways to motivate students to prepare for class in useful ways.

Participants engaged in a Think-Pair-Share activity in which they tried to identify six steps in a typical process their students might undertake to learn in their course.  This followed an introduction to the idea of a “time for telling,” so I asked participants to make sure that “telling” wasn’t the first step on their lists.  I also encouraged participants to force themselves to come up with six steps.  Coming up with three-step plans (take notes during class, figure things out in the homework, regurgitate on exams) is too easy.  Identifying a six-step process means you have think a little more intentionally about how your students learn.

Given the clicker question results indicating that lack of student preparation is a big challenge, we camped out for a while on the idea of a pre-class assignment.  I made two important points about these assignments: they should be graded, if only on effort, so that students will take them seriously and you should make use of these assignments in some way during class.  Otherwise students will see them as busywork, not connected with the “real” work of the course.  One participant shared her approach-she has students create outlines of their pre-class readings, then share and compare their outlines in small groups during class.

Monday morning (the day after my presentation), I saw on the book raffle table that there’s a new book on Just-in-Time Teaching, Just in Time Teaching: Across the Disciplines and Across the Academy,  edited by Scott Simkins and Mark Maier (Stylus, 2010).  I wish I had known that Sunday night-I would have mentioned it during that section of my presentation!

My third and final clicker question asked participants to identify one of five in-class engagement strategies they wanted to try soon.  While I wasn’t intending the presentation as a pitch for clickers, perhaps my biases couldn’t be hidden-clickers was the number one answer!  This result might have also been because clickers are new and different, but not so different as to require a complete rethinking of one’s teaching approach.  I’m convinced that the return on investment for teaching with clickers is high-one can make small changes in one’s teaching methods that yield significant results.

At the end of the presentation, I had the participants generate questions for me at their tables.  Most of the tables had at least one person with a Web-enabled device (such as the iPads several of the CMU staff hosting the event were sporting).  They used these to submit their tables’ questions via Google Moderator.  I asked them to vote on other tables’ questions, as well, providing me with a ranked list of the most popular questions.  This served as a reasonable demo of Google Moderator as a backchannel tool, but unfortunately I didn’t have time to address the questions that emerged through this process.  My plan is to address the more popular questions with Google Moderator since, as the creator of this Moderator session, I can leave comments on individual questions.  You can see the questions submitted by the group here.

The conference continues through Tuesday morning.  I was able to attend most of the conference on Monday, and I live-tweeted a couple of the sessions.  You can read my tweets here.  Joy Mighty of Queen’s University in Ontario delivered the Monday lunch keynote, and she made a strong case that by not paying attention to matters of diversity in our classroom, we run the risk of fostering inequity.  It was a thought-provoking keynote for me.

Thanks to Central Michigan University for having me as part of their conference and for some great conversations about student engagement!

More from my round-up of articles on clickers in the health professions.  A short, but interesting post today.  Your comments are invited…

Reference: Zurmehly, J., & Leadingham, C. (2008). Exploring student response systems in nursing education. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing, 26(5), 265-270.

Notes: This short article is another introduction to teaching with clickers, although I found it a little too prescriptive for my tastes.  There’s nothing here you won’t find in other articles with one very interesting exception:

To date, there has been no evidence of hacking or compromise to the SRS systems that were evaluated.  As a safeguard against tampering, a computer printout of responses can be generated and saved, to be used as a record for future references and to check for any attempted manipulation of grades.

Wow!  I’ve never heard this worry before.  Have you had to worry about students hacking into their clicker grades?

Image: “Me on Computer” by Flickr user Brian Lane Winfield Moore / Creative Commons licensed