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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

I couple of weeks ago on this blog, I shared a tweet by Colin Morris, a student at Kent State University in Ohio.  His comment (via Twitter) was, “44% OF MY U.S. HISTORY CLASS THINKS WATERBOARDING IS A SURFING TERM. I take back everything I’ve said about these ‘clickers’ being useless.”  After I shared this tweet on my blog, a few interesting things happened.

1. Colin Morris, the student who tweeted this (on the left above), found out about my blog post via Twitter and commented on my blog post, indicating that he saw pedagogical value in clickers but objected to the cost of his clicker, particularly as a senior who won’t use it in future courses.
2. Then Twitter user @iclickercrs, apparently affiliated with the i>clicker company, tweeted about my blog post.  Another Twitter user, @JonathanRose, a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada (on the right above), saw this tweet and decided to see how many of his (Canadian) students knew what waterboarding is.  He contacted Colin Morris, who directed Jonathan to the Kent State University instructor who posed this clicker question during class, John Jameson.  Jonathan Rose then used the same question in his introductory political science course.
3. Jonathan then posted the results of both questions–the student responses from Kent State and the ones from his Queen’s University students.  Here are the results [PDF].  As you can see, only 28% of his students thought that waterboarding is a surfing term.  Also, more of his students than the Kent State students viewed waterboarding more as torture than an interrogation technique.
4. To bring things full circle, Jonathan Rose tweeted about these results and @iclickercrs re-tweeted Jonathan’s tweet.  I saw this re-tweet, then tracked down Jonathan.  He let me know about items 2 and 3 above, filling in the gaps in my knowledge of this whole social media process.

Watching this all unfold has been very interesting, not only for the interesting uses and reactions to clicker questions, but for the way that Twitter has facilitated connections that might not have happened otherwise.

One Last Update: Colin Morris blogged about this, too, noting the importance of keeping in mind potential audiences when using social media.

It was @RogerFreedman who pointed me (via Twitter) to this short essay about the use of clickers in small political science classes.  In the essay, University of Denver political science professor Tom Knecht shares several reasons why he uses clickers in his small (15-25 student) classes.  Knecht echoes many of the reasons I provided for using clickers in a recent post, so, as LeVar Burton used to say on Reading Rainbow, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

• Knecht uses clickers for formative assessment, gauging his students’ understanding of points he makes during his lectures.  He finds that his students are often hesitant to ask questions when they don’t understand something, so clickers help him discover what’s unclear.
• He also uses clickers for graded quizzes, motivating his students to prepare for class.  Clickers allow him to distribute these quiz questions throughout a class session, instead of clustering them at the beginning or end of class on a paper quiz.
• He also finds that the fact that students’ responses are anonymous (as far as their peers are concerned) motivates his students to engage more fully in classwide discussions, particularly around questions on sensitive topics.  (These kinds of topics can arise frequently in political science courses.)  Since all students are asked to respond to his clicker questions, they are all more prepared to engage in the discussion that follows, which enhances that discussion.

Political science courses, like others in the social sciences, often involve questions that have correct and incorrect answers, critical-thinking questions that have multiple defensible answers, and student opinion questions.  As a result, clickers are great tools for these courses, as we see here.

I ran across two news stories this week describing campus viewing parties for last Friday’s presidential debate that featured the use of clickers to poll audience members.

About a hundred students watched the debate at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.  They were asked via clickers which candidate they preferred going into the debate as well as whether or not their support shifted as a result of the debate.

Meanwhile, another hundred students and community members watched the debate at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas.  Barbara DeSanto, chair of Washburn’s mass media department, said that clicker questions were used to involve audience members in the debate and to compare local polling data, gathered via clickers, with national polling data.

Have you used clickers during debate watching parties?  Are you planning to do so for tonight’s vice-presidential debate or next week’s presidential debate at Belmont University here in Nashville?  What kinds of questions are useful to ask before, during, or after a debate?  And have you used clickers in your courses to help students engage with the presidential election process this year?