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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve often said that those teaching in the social sciences have the most options for using clickers.  Both content and opinion questions are typically on-topic in a social science course, giving these instructors the ability to use clickers in just about any way imaginable.  Case in point: The video below by Russell James, who teaches in the housing and consumer economics program at the University of Georgia.

James covers a lot of ground in this video.  He shares examples of several types of clicker questions he uses, including student perspective questions (sometimes used to connect student opinions with results from national opinion polls), experiment questions (in which students participate in experiments designed to illustrate certain economic behaviors), and prediction questions (in which students predict the outcomes of research experiments from the literature).  James moves very quickly in this video, so be ready to pause it in order to read his sample questions.

James mentions other uses of clickers, too, such as taking a minute at the end of each class to ask students the kinds of rating questions that typically appear on end-of-semester course evaluations.  He says this is the “number one” use of clickers that has transformed his teaching, since it generates regular data on his teaching effectiveness.  James mentions a use I would call a monitoring question–asking students to click in when they’ve finished a particular task.  He notes that this lets him know when it’s time to move on after an activity and that the count of students who have finished displayed on-screen sends a message to students who aren’t keeping up with their peers.

James also describes a game he calls “clicker wars.”  In this game, often used to review for exams, he divides his students into groups, perhaps based on gender or class year.  Each group is then divided into teams of two or three students each, and each team is given a single clicker.  James then poses questions to his students, and each team must come to consensus on its answer.  If a team misses a question, they’re out of the game as a team, but can still help other teams in their group.  The winning team gets some kind of prize at the end of the game, and the winning group gets a prize, too, although a lesser one.  James says this gives students a lot of incentive to stay engaged in the game throughout.

James also suggests a few ways to handle students who cheat with clickers by bringing their absent friends’ clickers to class, making it appear that those friends are present.  Most of James’ suggestions I’ve mentioned here on the blog before, but he had a novel one, too.  He suggests taking a digital photo of the class as a deterrent.  If a student’s clicker says that student was present but the student isn’t in the photo, that becomes an honor code violation.  James says that telling students you’re doing this will prevent some cheating.

Thanks to Russell James for sharing his creative ideas for teaching with clickers!

As I mentioned in yesterday’s  post, I’ve been thinking about some of the ways that teaching with clickers taps into the participatory culture many of us now live in.  I’ve blogged in the past about ways clickers have been used in non-academic settings, particularly in community meetings, to identify areas of consensus and foster understanding of others.  Here’s another use to add to that collection, from the blog of the UK division of the audience response system Qwizdom:

London. 30^th March 2010. The people of Tower Hamlets have been using Qwizdom’s Audience Response System to vote interactively on how to best allocate council resources.

In a series of eight public meetings, members of this community voted on how to spend £2.4 million in the “You Decide!” participatory budget process.  Results of the votes were displayed on-screen for meeting participants for added transparency and community building.

Residents voted for more police officers, handyperson services for older people, youth projects, street lights, park improvements and many other items.

I’m impressed with this initiative, particularly in the amount of funds allocated through this process.  It also removes the “representative” from “representative democracy” in a helpful way, I think.  I would imagine this was a success with community residents.  They were given the opportunity to very directly express their opinions on how funds are to be spent.  I would guess that those residents who weren’t happy with the final decisions would leave the meetings with a greater understanding of their neighbors’ interests and opinions, which is likely to be helpful in the long run.

I wonder how small-group and meeting-wide discussion was handled at these meetings.  Asking community members (or students) for their opinions via clicker questions is usually most effective as a way to foster, not replace, discussion.  It’s also unclear if residents were limited to selecting one use each for the community funds or if they were encouraged to rank multiple uses.  The former voting method can be problematic at times, while the latter yields richer data on community interests.

For my non-UK readers: The title of the Qwizdom blog post is “Strictly Come… Democracy,” which is a play on the UK television series Strictly Come Dancing.  That’s the series that spawned the American show Dancing with the Stars, in case you were wondering.  Also, when composing in WordPress, click on the icon with the capital letter omega on it to insert a £ in your post!

Image: “VOTE” by Flickr user Theresa Thompson / Creative Commons licensed

I received an inquiry from a colleague recently asking my thoughts on the use of a “Are you here?” clicker question asked at the beginning of class to take attendance.   Since this isn’t an uncommon question I hear, I thought I would weigh in on it here on the blog.

In general, I would advise against the use of an attendance slide for the following primary reason:  Surveys of students regarding their opinions of clicker use consistently indicate that students have negative reactions to being “monitored” by clickers.  Students prefer to use clickers in ways that more clearly and explicitly benefit their learning.

For instance, in a 2007 study by Graham, Tripp, Seawright, and Joeckel, the primary reasons for negative student feelings about clickers were technical problems, the cost of the devices, the use of clickers for grading, and (most relevant to this discussion) the use of clickers to mandate attendance.

Similarly, in another 2007 student opinion study, Trees and Jackson (citation here) wrote, “Students were apathetic or negative toward clickers when the technology did not change the classroom experience in a self-evident manner.  Students need to be able to accomplish different things through the use of clicker questions than could be accomplished by simply listening to a lecture of the same material.”  Since an attendance question doesn’t add anything to the students’ learning experience in class, students are likely to be “apathetic or negative” toward such a use, particularly if the students are the ones purchasing the clickers.

Since students are more positive about the use of clickers when they are used to clearly enhance their learning, I would suggest that instead of using a stand-alone clicker question for attendance, it’s usually better to infer attendance from another clicker question, one that is designed to help students engage more deeply with the material.  For instance, if you have students engage in peer instruction around a clicker question, the students will have a valuable learning experience, and you’ll still be able to determine from the response system reports which students were present that day in class.

Another option that many instructors implement is to start class with a “warm-up” question, typically an “easy” question about the reading or the previous class or an off-topic, sometimes funny question (perhaps about some recent event in pop culture or campus news).  Some instructors will have this question displayed on-screen as students arrive as a reminder to them to take their clickers out and get ready for future clicker questions during class.

For example, here’s a warm-up question I used last fall the week after the MTV Video Music Awards:

What do you think of Kanye West’s treatment of Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards?

1. He should be sent to a place where people aren’t.
2. He’s a jerk.
3. That was pretty funny.
4. He had a point–Beyonce’s video was way better.

This question had nothing to do with linear algebra, but it did provide a fun way to start the class session.  (If you’re interested, the top answer was “He’s a jerk” with 43% of the vote.  Runner-up with “He had a point” with 29%.)  Warm-up questions allow instructors to take attendance while also providing something else of value to the students–a friendly reminder to gear up for class and perhaps an icebreaker moment at the start of class.

I’ll also point out that if you include clicker questions as part of students’ participation grades in your course, even if you’re just grading on effort and not accuracy of their answers, you are effectively mandating attendance.  However, it seems that students see participation grades much more favorably than they do attendance policies.

Do you take attendance with clickers?  If so, how?

Image: “Angry Face” by Flickr user teapics

Although relatively few instructors in the humanities use clickers, if there’s one discipline in the humanities where clickers are starting to get some traction, it would be philosophy. I interviewed a couple of philosophy faculty members for my book (including Ron McClamrock of SUNY-Albany), and I’ve recently found a few online resources for using clickers in philosophy, listed below.

Why the particular interest in clickers among philosophy instructors? Perhaps it’s because some teach courses in logic, and these courses are often more like math courses (where clickers are more mainstream) than typical humanities courses. Perhaps it’s because some philosophy instructors teach relatively large classes–larger than is typical in English and language instruction, certainly–and clickers excel in large classes. However, I suspect the primary reason clickers have been adopted in philosophy is because philosophy instructors like to ask what I call “student perspective questions” in my book. These opinion and experience questions work beautifully in ethics courses, and I imagine they work well in other philosophy courses, as well.

On the Teaching Philosophy 101 site, John Immerwahr provides an introduction to teaching with clickers in philosophy courses.  He suggests a few uses of clickers that are of particular use in teaching philosophy.  For instance, he suggests asking students a few opinion questions at the beginning of a unit to surface their perspectives on the topic, helping them have a great stake in the discussion that follows.  He also suggests asking the same questions before and after a topic is discussed as a way to show students that “serious discussion of issues actually matters to how people think (a point which they sometimes don’t get initially).”

Immerwahr also stresses a point about clickers that is sometimes subtle: They can be used to generate “meta-conversations,” as he calls them.

Interestingly, the wording of the questions themselves often creates prompts for discussion. Student like to discuss why the class voted as it did, and people will sometimes make interesting distinctions (e.g., a student might say “If the question has said ‘can’ make a difference instead of ‘will’ make a difference, I would have voted differently,” which can then lead into another interesting discussion).

In my talks on teaching with clickers, I’ll often mention that the results display itself can generate useful discussion.  Asking students why the class voted as it did can often lead to productive discussions of assumptions students make about themselves and each other.

Immerwahr’s example also reminds me of another point I often make, that the wording on clicker questions need not be as precise as the wording on exam questions.  One reason is that if the question isn’t worded exactly right, an instructor can still make it work during the discussion of the question.  Another is that clicker questions can be modified and asked again based on student comments during discussion.  In Immerwahr’s example, for instance, the instructor could easily change “will” to “can” in the question and re-poll the students.

For an expanded version of Immerwahr’s introduction to clickers, read his Teaching Philosophy article, “Engaging the ‘Thumb Generation’ with Clickers.”  The article includes more discussion of the clicker uses mentioned above, as well as other uses, and features several sample questions.

And for even more resources on using clickers in philosophy instruction, visit the Peer Instruction in the Humanities project out of Monash University in Australia.  This site features a step-by-step guide to PI, advice on designing a PI lecture, a description of a sample PI lecture, examples of various types of clicker questions appropriate for this teaching context, and even a question bank organized by topic!  I’m very glad to know that there’s a humanities clicker question bank out there to complement existing question banks in the sciences.

Image: “Portrait of Erasmus Desiderius“, Andreas Praefcke, Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a nice follow-up to my previous post about backchannel use during live performances.  Over at Abilene Christian University, where all the students (more or less) have iPhones, a group of students were given extra credit for watching the recent State of the Union address by US President Barack Obama.  However, they didn’t just watch it; they responded to clicker questions asked by their instructor on-the-fly during the speech.  The students used their iPhones to respond to these questions, but any kind of classroom response system would do the trick for something like this.  This seems like a great way to use some student perspective questions to help students engage more meaningfully with a live broadcast of this nature. (You may recall that I mentioned some universities that did something similar during the 2008 presidential debates.)

ACU also thought ahead to video the evening!

[Note: This post has nothing directly to do with teaching with classroom response systems.  However, I found the book reviewed below a great read, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it somewhere.  Also, I think the book has some implications for those teaching courses where student perspective clicker questions are common.]

In researching his book The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Tim Clydesdale, a sociologist at the College of New Jersey, conducted in-depth interviews with 75 teenagers, many of whom he interviewed before and after their first year out of high school.  The interviewees were diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, religious background, and socioeconomic class, and they came from six states in the Northeast as well as Oregon.  In the book, Clydesdale describes how these teens navigated relationships, managed gratifications, approached work, spent money, and experienced college.  Clydesdale shares the stories of several of his interview subjects (de-identified), and these stories make concrete the broader conclusions Clydesdale draws from his research.

Perhaps most relevant to college and university educators are Clydesdale’s conclusions regarding the first-year student experience:

During their first year out, American teens become cognitively sharper but intellectually immune.  The overwhelming majority of American teens are practical credentialists.  They understand that diplomas are necessary for better jobs and that for the highest status jobs, grades are important, too.  Thus, they become adept at playing the game of college, putting in minimal effort to obtain the desired grade.

Clydesdale argues that while first-year students gain improved cognitive and communication skills in college, they retain very little of the content to which they are exposed in their first year.  Furthermore, Clydesdale asserts that “intellectual curiosity is not a value that [they] esteem.”  He notes that this disinterest in intentional learning is not unique to first-year students; American adults are rarely intellectually curious.  Thus American teens’ experiences with learning reflect those of mainstream American society.

First-year students tend to have narrow perspectives on political, economic, and social issues, according to Clydesdale.  That is to say, their perspectives on such issues rarely broaden during their first year out.  Instead, they put their core identities-their perspectives on family, faith, and community-in “identity lockboxes” their first year out.  Instead of embracing or even exploring broader perspectives, they focus on what Clydesdale calls “daily life management,” learning to navigate relationship, manage gratifications, balance work and school and play, and generally learn to take care of themselves more independently.  Clydesdale writes, “Most American teens… actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism.”

In his final chapter, Clydesdale provides recommendations for educators based on his research.  He suggests that educators take an “end-user’s perspective” to their work, helping students to identify their interests and then designing learning experiences that connect those interests to existing bodies of knowledge, improve students’ cognitive and communication skills, and provide students with applied problem-solving experience that draws on that knowledge and those skills.  He suggests that educators should identify the knowledge and skills that college graduates retain and use and “work backward” to design a “student-centered curriculum” that fosters that knowledge and those skills.

Clydesdale asserts that educators who attempt to broaden their first-year students’ perspectives are wasting their time because students are too focused on daily life management to open their identity lockboxes.  He suggests that such perspective work might occur during college students’ sophomore and junior years, when they are not experiencing significant transitions in life, but he leaves that as an open question.

The qualitative research that Tim Clydesdale summarizes in The First Year Out is persuasive, and it provides insights into the first-year experience that are sometimes lacking in survey data.  Most of the student stories he shares in the book come from his interviews with New Jersey students, and there is some geographical bias in his narrative.  However, his findings are based on interviews with students across the county and thus are worth consideration by all educators.  His recommendations speak directly to the first-year curriculum and support the use of seminar classes focused on writing, speaking, and analytical skills.

Clydesdale’s warning that educators who seek to broaden their first-year students’ perspectives are wasting their time is a sobering one.  He notes that some students (including, perhaps surprisingly, many of those at religious colleges) do broaden their perspectives and are intellectually curious, so it is certainly possible for first-year students to have transformative experiences.  However, he also notes that many of those who do end up entering the professoriate.  The First Year Out makes a strong case that we educators should not assume our students are like us, and that we should seek to better understand our students so that we can better prepare them to more meaningfully engage with the world.

For more on Tim Clydesdale’s work, visit his home page.  Also, read his January 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology.”

Reference: DeBourgh, G. A. (2008). Use of classroom “clickers” to promote acquisition of advanced reasoning skills. Nurse Education in Practice, 8(2), 76-87.

Summary: Gregory DeBourgh provides a useful introduction to using clickers in nursing education, focusing on pedagogical strategies that use clickers to promote critical thinking.  His exploration of critical thinking in the context of nursing education is particularly interesting.  Here’s a sample:

“Reasoning is about using intellectual power to draw conclusions, form judgments, and make inferences based on evidence, education, and experience… The practical significance of acquiring skill in advanced reasoning is to move to the level of predictive clinical reasoning which enables one to anticipate both ideal and likely outcomes given a set of data.”

DeBourgh argues that using classroom response systems to engage students in high-level questions is an effective strategy for developing their critical thinking skills.  He supports this assertion by drawing on the literature on the roles of feedback and questioning in learning and by sharing concrete examples of clicker uses in nursing education.

Included are three sample questions, including a “one-best-answer” question that asks students to identify the likely cause of a particular symptom shown by a patient in a case study.  DeBourgh endorses the use of such questions since they better represent situations students are likely to encounter in clinical settings where they must deal with ambiguity.  He also suggests asking question sequences based around patient cases that “change the focus to add new variables,” noting that doing so also reduces the cognitive load students experience when familiarizing themselves with a new case.

DeBourgh makes a good argument for using clicker questions to model critical thinking skills for students:

“Anticipate likely incorrect responses and prepare ‘talking points’ for discussion as this facilitates ‘thinking on your feet’ and makes more visible to students how an expert uses heuristics, reasoning, and refined problem-solving skills to gain command of a clinical situation.”

Asking questions designed to provide an opportunity for the instructor to model critical thinking is one instance of many DeBourgh describes of crafting questions to meet particular teaching and learning objectives.  In doing so, DeBourgh draws on articles by Ian Beatty on good question design, transferring Ian’s advice to the context of nursing education.

DeBourgh also points out that clicker questions embedded in PowerPoint can be particularly useful in nursing, a field which frequently uses pictures, diagrams, sound clips, and video–media that can also be embedded in PowerPoint.  He also notes that nursing courses often involve discussion of nursing ethics and student opinions about ethical decisions, topics that lend themselves well to clicker questions.

The article also includes results from a study survey about clicker use.  Student responses to rating questions are summarized, and student responses to open-ended questions are presented, as well.

DeBourgh ends with a few challenges involved in teaching with clickers, two of which are particularly significant.  He notes that since instructors can track student performance in a class on a daily basis, expectations for students are raised, which is not popular with all students.  DeBourgh also speaks to the increased expectations for instructors:

“The greatest challenge is the new role for faculty to plan the curriculum and instruction around ‘deep comprehension’ rather than ‘covering content’ using a traditional lecture format.”

Comments: I read this article in advance of my presentation at the Health Professional Educational Research Symposium earlier in the month, and I was particularly impressed with Gregory DeBourgh’s eloquence in describing critical thinking in the context of nursing education and in describing ways that clicker pedagogies can foster those critical thinking skills.

As I’ve tried to capture above, DeBourgh describes a variety of ways of using clickers in nursing education, and he included one approach that was entirely new to me, one inspired by the 50-50 option in the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? DeBourgh suggests that before the correct answer to a clicker question is revealed to students, an instructor might ask the students which answer choices should be eliminated.  It’s a little unclear how DeBourgh implements this, but I can even imagine setting up a multiple-mark question with four answer choices, then asking students not to select the one correct answer but to select two incorrect answers.  This would offer a nice change of pace in question format and would help students focus on more than just the correct answer.  It’s often useful for students to consider why some answer choices are plausible on the surface but actually incorrect.

Hopefully it’s also above that DeBourgh puts an emphasis on teaching with case studies (multimedia case studies, at that) in his article.  I understand that case study methods are perhaps more common in nursing than they are in other disciplines, and I appreciated reading this article as a way to better understand why that was the case.  DeBourgh’s comments about using clickers for discussing ethics also helped me better understand the disciplinary context here.

If you’re a nursing educator, please share a thought or two about using clickers in your field in the comments section!

Update: Greg DeBourgh emailed me and clarified his 50-50 technique.  Here’s what he said:

I display the potential four-answers to a given question, then before the students “vote” with their clickers, I ask for a volunteer or select a student at random (my clicker system has this feature) and ask the student to eliminate 2 of the 4 potential answers and to explain why they are eliminating these two. This speaking out loud of their rationale for eliminating two of the potential answers that are not related to the question strengthens the students’ reasoning skills. They actually get quite good at it. If the student I called upon to answer hesitates or is reluctant to speak, I invite them to choose a “consultant” in the room to help them out. I hope this clarifies a bit for you.

I asked Greg what he does if the student eliminates the correct answer.  Here’s his response:

If the student eliminates one of the correct answers, it is still learning, and so I ask “does everyone agree with the 50/50 elimination?” If someone objects, I ask for their rationale. If no one objects, I just let the process go and during the “reveal and rationale” we talk about why each answer is incorrect or correct.

Thanks, Greg, for this clarification, and for this great use of clickers.