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"Dede does nothing in this article but set up a false dichotomy between professors committed to outdated, boring and irrelevant teaching methods and those eagerly embracing the modern technologies that contemporary students crave."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

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.

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

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

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

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.  This time, another article that doesn’t add much to the literature, but raises an interesting idea.  Again, your comments are invited…

Reference: Williams, B., & Boyle M. (2008). The use of interactive wireless keypads for interprofessional learning experiences by undergraduate emergency health students. International Journal of Education and Development Using ICT, 4(1).

Notes: This article has features results from a survey of students using clickers in a “foundations of health” course taken by emergency health students as well as students majoring in “nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, midwifery, health science, and social work.”  The authors refer to this as interprofessional education, “learning that represents a way of fostering collaborative and seamless, integrated patient-care education.”  I first heard about this approach from my POD Network colleague Marilla Svinicki, who is involved in interprofessional education at the Clinical Education Center affiliated with the University of Texas-Austin.  The CEC is an impressive initiative.

I was interested to hear how clickers would play out in this setting, one featuring students with a diverse set of backgrounds and career goals.  However, the course is a first-year course, so the students weren’t likely to have differentiated themselves yet.  Moreover, there’s no attention paid to these different majors in the survey results that are reported here.  (The survey results are very positive, however, and are in keeping with other surveys I’ve mentioned here on the blog before.)

Have you used clickers in a course that included groups of students from different majors?  I can imagine forming heterogeneous student groups, then giving each group a single clicker as part of small-group activities during class.  How would you teach a course like this?

Update: Just a couple of days after posting this, I learned that Vanderbilt University has an interprofessional program something like the one at UT-Austin.  The Vanderbilt program involves medical and nursing students from Vanderbilt and social work students from Tennessee State University.  The students work together (with mentors) in clinical settings half a day per week and participate in classroom-based learning (using reflective exercises and case study activities) half a day a week, as well.  The rest of the week they participate in their respective programs as normal.  Given the complex nature of health care today, this seems like an incredibly sensible approach to health professions education.

Image: “Colourful Army” by Flickr user maistora / Creative Commons licensed