Back in May 2010, I led a webinar on teaching with clickers as part of the CIRTLcast series for the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL), an NSF-sponsored network of six universities interested in preparing future science, engineering, and mathematics faculty. The full webinar was 60 minutes, and you can access the audio recording and my slides in the CIRTLcast archive. However, CIRTL has done a great job taking some excerpts from the session and packaging them as a 10-minute YouTube video, complete with a transcript!

In the video, you’ll hear me talk about using clickers to generate small-group and classwide discussion, create “times for telling,” encourage metacognition, facilitate peer assessment, structure class time, turn quizzes into learning experiences, and make class more fun. Clickers can be used very effectively to engage students in the learning process during class, and this short video is a nice introduction to these uses of clickers.

Thanks to CIRTL for giving me the opportunity to present this webinar and for putting together this great video!

Here are a few interesting ideas shared during the first set of talks about teaching with clickers at the Joint Mathematics Meetings earlier today.  (This post’s title inspired by the following books seen at the exhibits: Calculus Gems, Mathematical Diamonds, More Mathematical Morsels, and Biscuits of Number Theory.)

Kathryn Ernie (University of Wisconsin-River Falls) shared ways that she and her colleagues use clickers in their college algebra courses.  One use that she mentioned was to warm students up before “traditional” in-class quizzes.  By asking students a clicker question or two, then discussing those questions prior to a graded quiz, the students are able to approach the quiz with a little more confidence.

Ben Galluzzo (Shippensburg University) also talked about graded quizzes.  However, in his case, clicker questions aren’t warm-ups for the quiz; the clicker questions are the quiz.  Clickers allow Ben to turn his quizzes into learning experiences for his students.  After each quiz question, he discusses the question with the class before moving on to the next question.  This can work particularly well when he has more than one quiz question of the same type.  Students who miss the first one can learn from the discussion of that question and apply what they’ve learned to the subsequent question.  Students like this because they appreciate the chance to redeem themselves.

Aprillya Lanz (Virginia Military Institute) mentioned that teaching with clickers help students stay awake and engaged during class.  This is particularly important for her since many of her students are freshmen (“rats” as they’re called at VMI) who are required to participate in all kinds of strenuous physical activities, particularly on Sunday nights.  This can make for some very sleepy students in Monday morning classes.

Daniel Joseph (also VMI) described a problem that those who teach calculus often see: His calculus students often struggle because of pre-calculus misconceptions.  They can’t tackle the calculus because they get tripped up by algebra and other pre-calc topics.  He described several methods he’s tried to combat this, but he finds that the students’ over-confidence trips keeps these methods from working.  The students say they “know” all the pre-calculus material because they’ve studied it in the past.  Daniel appreciates how clickers provide his students with frequent evidence that they don’t know it as well as they think they do.

Daniel shared one approach to attacking this problem–using clicker questions in a pre-semester pre-calculus course for incoming freshmen.  He’s interested in hearing ideas for hitting this issue, with or without clickers, in the calculus course itself.  Any ideas?

(By the way, Daniel used the phrase “attack this problem” at least five times in his presentation.  Given that he teaches at a military institute, I figured that was language that comes naturally to him.  Thus my use of the verbs tackle, combat, attack, and hit above!)

University of British Columbia professor of earth and ocean sciences Roland Stull recently gave his popular course on the science of storms a clicker makeover.  Persuaded by research from Carl Wieman’s Science Education Initiative at UBC, he now structures his class sessions around conceptual understanding clicker questions, using a version of the standard peer instruction technique.  Stull has his students read their textbook and respond to online quiz questions the night before class.  He has a TA analyze their answers for common areas of confusion, then adjusts his plans for class to address those areas.  Stull notes a variety of benefits to this teaching approach:

“It’s a lot more fun for me to teach the class,” Stull said in an interview in his UBC office. “Not only are the students interacting with themselves, but they are much more willing to ask me questions during class.”

The Georgia Straight article about Stull’s use of clickers quotes Alan Webb, a University of Waterloo accounting professor who published a study ostensibly showing that teaching with clickers actually decreases student participation in class.  However, as I noted in my review of this study, what Webb actually showed was that indicating the correct answer to a clicker questions prior to class discussion of the question decreases student participation.

At the University of Buffalo School of Dentistry, instructors John Maggio and Chester Gary have students respond to questions during class using their laptops as response devices.  The school requires students to have laptops so they can access electronic textbooks, so using “virtual clicker” software on student laptops makes sense.  Maggio finds that his students have rather short attention spans, so he uses clicker questions to keep them engaged during his 90-minute classes, asking as many as twelve questions per class.  The frequent questions and the fact that some are graded on accuracy (not just effort) keep his students from using their laptops to distract themselves.

Just like Roland Stull at UBC, John Maggio says that his clicker questions have increased participation in his class:

“They raise their hands much more often, they’re discussing things much more, they’re participating more than they ever have,” [Maggio] says, noting that his classes featured very little discussion or debate before the introduction of the audience-response technology.

One of the criticisms I often hear about teaching with clickers is that doing so gives shy students an excuse not to summon the courage to speak out in class.  These two news articles would indicate that’s not the case, after all.

My session on supporting faculty teaching with clickers at the POD Network conference last week went very well.  In one of the session activities, I provided participants with a list of common and uncommon uses of clickers and asked them to indicate whether each use is more likely to be implemented by an instructor new to using clickers (“novices”) or more likely only to be implemented by an instructor with some experience teaching with clickers (“veterans”).  I then polled the session participants using a few clicker questions.

You can download a copy of this handout from my session’s page on WikiPODia, but I thought I would share the results of some of the polling questions here.

As you can see, most of the session participants thought that taking attendance is something that those new to using clickers are likely to do.  I should clarify that this doesn’t mean that veterans don’t do this, just that it’s not something that only veterans would do.  One participant who said that only veterans would take attendance with clickers indicated that it takes a veteran to figure out how to link clicker responses to student rolls in the system she uses!

When it comes to using clickers to administer and grade quizzes, the participants were split.  (Check the percentages above, not the sizes of the bars in the chart.)  I think some instructors new to clickers see clickers as a way to make quizzes easier and faster to implement.  However, unless a clicker quiz is reviewed with the students immediately after it’s administered, using clickers to administer the quiz doesn’t really add value to the students’ learning experience, it just makes the instructor’s life easier.

Why might this use of clickers be something that only more veteran clicker users implement?  One answer is that instructors who find out about clickers from people like Eric Mazur (and me, for that matter) often see value in the use of clickers for informal assessment and agile teaching during class.  Adopters who lead with the peer instruction method of using clickers are less likely to use clickers for formal, graded quizzes.

On the other hand, using clickers to facilitate peer instruction is something that my session participants felt was more the province of experienced clicker users.  Sure, some instructors will start using clickers in this way, influenced by people like Eric Mazur and me.  However, one session participant said that instructors not used to having students discuss during class might find this use of clickers a little too different to implement when just getting started with clickers.

I’ll admit I was surprised by the results of this question.  I hear from a lot of instructors who like this use of clickers.  What do you think?  Is using clickers to facilitate peer instruction and small-group discussion something that those new to using clickers typically do?  Or is it more of an “advanced” use of clickers?

I’ve got a few more results slides to share with you in a later blog post, so stay tuned.

Reference: Mayer, R. E., Stull, A., DeLeeuw, K., Almeroth, K., Bimber, B., Chun, D., Bulger, M., Campbell, J., Knight, A., & Zhang, H. (2009). Clickers in college classrooms: Fostering learning with questioning methods in large lecture classes. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34(1), 51-57.

Summary: In this article, Richard Mayer and his collaborators, nine in all, describe the results of an experiment comparing the use of clickers to non-clicker alternatives.  A large enrollment educational psychology course, taken mostly by junior and senior psychology majors, was taught one year in a “traditional” method, without the use of in-class questioning or clickers.  The next year, the same course (with very similar students) was taught using in-class questioning facilitated by clickers.  In the third year, in-class questions were used, but instead of having students respond using clickers, students wrote their responses down on paper quizzes, passed those papers in to the instructor, then indicated their responses to the questions with a show of hands.

Differences among the three courses were kept to a minimum.  The same instructor taught all three courses, and the lecture materials were repeated, as well, with the exception of the additional questions added to the clicker and no-clicker groups.  Reading assignments and exam questions were identical, as well.  Having the students respond to questions in writing in the no-clicker class meant that their initial responses to a question were largely made independently of their peers, just as in the clicker class.  (The answers they signified during the shows of hands were, on the other hand, not necessarily independent.)

There were some differences, however.  The in-class questions in the clicker and no-clicker groups were graded (1 point for answering incorrectly, 2 points for answering correctly), which meant grade incentives were a possible motivator in those two groups.  There was no parallel grade incentive in the “control” group.  Also, in the no-clicker class, the paper quizzes were typically administered at the end of a class session for logistic reasons (distributing and collecting the quizzes took time), whereas in the clicker class, questions were asked at various points during class.

The authors’ findings were certainly interesting.  When they compared midterm and exam performance across the three courses, they found that the clicker class performed significantly better on the exams, averaging 75.1 points out of a possible 90.  The no-clicker class averaged 72.3, and the control group averaged 72.2.  (The difference here was statistically significant with p=.003.)  So the clicker class ended up with an average grade in the course 1/3 of a letter grade higher than the other two classes, a B instead of a B-.  And the paper quizzes plus hand-raising had “no discernible difference on student learning outcomes.”

Even more interesting was the following.  The clicker class performed almost identically to the other two classes on exam questions that were similar to questions asked (via clickers or paper quizzes) in class.  However, on exam questions that were dissimilar to in-class questions, the clicker class performed significantly better (50.2 vs. 47.9 and 48.2, p=.002).

The authors conclude from these data that the logistical difficulty of implementing the paper quizzes (distributing the quizzes, collecting the quizzes, and so on) interfered with any benefit gained from questioning students in this manner.  They also note that doing the questioning at the end of a class session might reduce the impact of the questioning on the students’ learning.  The use of clickers made questioning students “seamless” for the instructor and allowed the instructor to test and provide feedback to students closer in time to the initial learning experience.

The authors also note that some of the components of active learning–”(a) paying more attention to the lecture in anticipation of having to answer questions, (b) mentally organizing and integrating learned knowledge in order to answer questions, and (c) developing metacognitive skills for gauging how well they understood the lecture material”–might serve to explain why the clicker class outperformed the other two classes on exam questions dissimilar to in-class questions.

Comments: These results are fairly persuasive.  The authors did a good job of controlling for potentially confounding variables, and the use of three groups–clickers, no clickers, and control–meant that they could isolate the effect of the clickers from the effect of having students respond to questions during class.  Their conclusion–that clickers make questioning easier for both instructors and students and so allow questioning to have more impact–makes sense to me.

Another possible explanation for the higher learning gains in the clicker class is that the students in the clicker class were able to see the display of results of the clicker questions, whereas the students in the no-clicker class had to rely on a show of hands to see where their peers stood on a question.  Since it’s been shown that the hand-raising method leads to inaccurate representations of student understanding (see, for instance, Stowell and Nelson, 2007), it could be that the more accurate reporting of student responses to questions allowed by the classroom response system led to students taking the process more seriously in one way or another.

It’s also worth noting that after questions were asked and answered by students in both the clicker and no-clicker class, not too much happened.  The instructor would state the correct answer, have a student volunteer share reasons for the correct answer, then share his own reasons for the correct answer.  There wasn’t much in the way of agile teaching (doing something different in class in response to the results of a clicker question) or peer instruction (having students discuss questions with each other prior to answering).  There wasn’t much discussion of incorrect answers, apparently.  All of these processes have potential pedagogical benefits.  Had they been employed, the different in learning outcomes between the clicker class and the other two classes might have been even greater.

I should also point out that the article doesn’t clearly state the instructor’s experience teaching with clickers, although it seems a safe bet that the instructor was new to using clickers.  Instructor experience is another important variable, as is the nature and difficulty of the questions used.  A few sample questions were included in the article, but it would have been helpful to know how difficult the students found these questions.  Did most students answer them correctly?  Did a lot of students answer them incorrectly?

One of the questions I’m asked most often when I present about teaching with clickers is the “coverage” question: How do you cover all the content you need to in a course if you spend class time having students think about, vote on, and discuss clicker questions?  All that active learning during class must mean you can’t cover all the same content, right?

Although I find the term “cover” problematic, I understand these questions.  Particular in courses that are prerequisites for other courses, there’s a need to make sure students learn a certain (usually large) amount of material.  In talking with faculty who teach with clickers, I’ve heard several different kinds of responses to the “coverage” question, ones I detail in my book.  One response is to move some of the learning that would have taken place during class to out-of-class time.  One way to do this is by having our students read their textbooks before class, which I’ve done in my math courses for several years now.  This means that students come to class with some exposure and understanding of the material, which allows class time to be spent helping the students make sense of that material and go deeper via clicker questions and other active learning techniques.

However, since studies show that only about 30% of students will read their textbooks before class without some kind of incentive, it’s helpful to have students complete pre-class reading quizzes online.  This semester, I’m having my students do so via our course blog.  I post three or four open-ended questions about the textbook section we’ll be addressing in class.  They respond to those questions in the comments below the blog post.  (I’m using the Semi-Private Comments WordPress plugin to make sure student can’t see each others’ responses.)  I grade them on effort, and the quizzes count toward a class participation grade. I’ve found these pre-class reading quizzes do the job well.  I probably have between 80 and 90% of my students read the textbook before class and make at least some sense out of it judging by their responses to the reading quiz questions.

An added benefit to having students complete pre-class reading quizzes is that I can draw on student responses to open-ended quiz questions to create in-class clicker questions.  Here’s an example:

Consider Question 1 on the Introductory Problems handout and Example 1 in Section 1.6.  These two problems involve input-output relationships between different sectors of an economy.  In what ways are these problems essentially different?  Which of the following is the best answer to this question?

1. The output from one sector in the example is entirely used up by the other sectors. In the handout, the output is only partly used and a net excess is provided.
2. Example 1 asks for the total annual outputs of the coal, electric, and steel sectors. Whereas question 1 is looking for the production levels for an outside demand.
3. In the original example, we’re solving the system to meet a single expectation from a foreign country of three demands, whereas the book’s example is looking to maximize the productivity.  This means the book’s example has multiple solutions and we’re looking for the best of them, where as our original only has one.
4. The two problems are different as the first is trying to find the initial inputs to achieve certain outputs while the second problem is about finding the market price.

The exact same question was posed on the pre-class reading quiz the night before as an open-ended question.  The answer choices you see here actual student responses to that open-ended question.  During class, I had my students respond to this clicker question, letting them know that four of them should recognize their own words in the answer choices.

The votes were split 30% / 0% / 43% / 26% among the four answer choices, which is a great distribution for generating discussion about the question.  It helped that the most popular answer (#3) was partially incorrect.  (The book example did not, in fact, deal with maximizing productivity.)  The other two answers selected by the students (#1 and #4) are both correct, although #4 gets at the heart of the difference between the two examples more than #1 does.

Some of the students were bothered by the fact that this question doesn’t have a single correct answer.  However, since I’m trying to help my students improve their ability to communicate mathematical and technical ideas, it’s worth spending time on a question like this one, where the quality of the explanation plays an important factor.

We had a funny moment when the student who supplied the popular but incorrect answer choice (#3) spoke up after we had discussed what that choice was incorrect.  He didn’t directly own up to his answer, but instead said something like, “I think the student who gave that answer probably didn’t catch on to the fact that productivity wasn’t being maximized.  He probably has a much better understanding of the example now.”

It can be challenging to write clicker questions with answer choices that align well with student understandings and misunderstandings of a topic.  Taking the students’ very own responses as answer choices is one way to get around this.  It also communicates to students that the pre-class reading quizzes are an integral part of their learning experience.

Back in January, I blogged about a New York Times article describing MIT’s Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) classrooms.  Just today, Diana Senechal blogged about the article, too, as well as her own experiences as an adult student in a physics class that uses clickers.  A few important questions were raised in Diana’s post and in the comments that followed it–questions about the prep time teachers need to teach with clickers and about which students we should be trying to benefit through our teaching.  I weighed in on those questions on Diana’s blog post, but I thought I would reproduce my comments here in case my readers would like to weigh in, too.

I’ve taught math courses with clickers for five years now, and (full disclosure) I’ve written a book on teaching with clickers, one that draws upon interviews I conducted with 50 faculty members in different disciplines, including physics.  As you might expect, I have a few thoughts about the questions raised here!

The first thing I noticed reading this post and its comments was the juxtaposition of the MIT student’s comment that using clicker-facilitated active learning during class means professors don’t have to prepare as much and Mike Anderson’s comment that using the IFAT quizzes he describes took more, not less, preparation time.

I think Mike’s hit the nail on the head: Figuring out what misconceptions students are likely to have, which is required for coming up with plausible wrong answers to multiple-choice questions, is challenging work.  And doing what the MIT physics professors are doing–designing intensive learning experiences that help students resolve misconceptions and build their knowledge–is even more challenging.  It requires a great deal of understanding of student learning and motivation.

Speaking of student motivation, the question was raised above asking which students are benefited by more active classroom learning experiences.  I would argue that as teachers, we have a responsibility to try to motivate and teach all our students, not just the ones that are self-motivated or the ones who learn best by listening to a lecture.  I think it’s great that Diana enjoys and benefits from a great lecture.  Evidence points to the fact that such students are in the minority.  Combining lectures with more participatory learning experiences is likely to benefit more students’ learning.

I’ll also point out that the pedagogy behind Mike’s IFAT quizzes is very similar to the pedagogy behind effective instruction with clickers–getting students to actively engage with problems and to discuss those problems with peers and their instructors, and providing instructors with useful feedback on student learning, feedback that can inform future instruction.  As Ricki points out, it’s the pedagogy that counts more than the technology.

That being said, clickers provide a few advantages that other technologies don’t.  Clickers allow me to hold my students accountable for their class participation since the system tracks individual student responses.  However, clickers also provide students with a level of anonymity since their peers can’t see who they responded, making it safer for them to take risks and be wrong.  (Asking a question to a class of students and taking the first student response privileges those students who are quicker, more confident, and more experienced.  It leaves all the other students out of the loop, unfortunately.)  And the instant display of results (in the form of a bar graph) provides the instructor with useful information for making on-the-fly teaching choices and can have an impact on student motivation.  If, for instance, students see that most of them answered a question incorrectly, they’re more likely to pay attention to the explanation that follows.

So, dear readers, what say you?  Any thoughts on the prep time issue or the question of which students are most benefited from active engagement teaching techniques?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Reference: Fies, C., & Marshall, J. (2008). The C³ framework: Evaluating classroom response system interactions in university classrooms. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 17, 483-499.

Summary: The authors interviewed and observed nine instructors in different disciplines and surveyed students in one of their own courses (in which clickers and hand-raising were used to respond to questions during alternating weeks) in order to analyze ways in which both teachers and students make use of and react to classroom response systems.  The authors organize most of their findings in a “framework of interaction” they call the C³ framework.

The authors observed that some instructors focused more on performance goals, using clickers to take attendance and administer quizzes.  Other instructors focused more on mastery goals, using clickers to practice agile teaching, facilitate peer instruction, ask one-best-answer questions, create “teachable moments” by creating on-the-fly questions in response to student comments, and make use of student suggestions for answer choices.  The authors note that instructors tended to use clickers in ways that matched their existing orientation toward performance or mastery goals; using clickers did not significantly change their goals.

Feedback from the students studied indicated that students appreciated finding out where they stood among their peers and that clickers increased their participation in class.  There were also indications that in the weeks that clickers were used, student understanding deepened, although comments on the end-of-semester meta-reflection indicated that students were not always aware of this.  It should be noted that the students studied were mostly female pre-service teachers taking a physical sciences course.

The C³ interaction framework developed by the authors includes three components, each of which can be viewed from a teacher or student’s perspective:

• What concerns does the teacher/student have?  Performance goals or mastery goals?
• Where should a class be centered?  On the students or on the teacher?
• Who should have control of the interactions in class?  The students or the teacher?

They note that each of these Cs is a continuum, not a binary choice, and that the element of control tends to be a function of the other two elements.

Comments: Probably the most important point the authors make is that clickers can be used in ways that align with an instructor’s existing orientation toward performance or mastery goals or toward teacher-centeredness or student-centeredness.  I would argue that using clickers can lead to instructors to adopt more mastery-oriented and student-centered teaching practices, but as Fies and Marshall point out, this change is not automatic.  Given the flexibility of the technology, instructors are quite able to adapt it to their existing teaching practices.

The authors point out that a more restrictive technology, one that only supports mastery orientations and student-centeredness, might encourage more instructors to change their teaching practices accordingly.  However, such a technology might not be of interest to instructors not already teaching in student-centered ways.

What then might help instructors think about their teaching choices in ways that open them to consider mastery orientations and student-centered teaching?  I wonder what kind of assistance in using clickers the instructors in this study were given.  Perhaps pedagogically-oriented workshops, working groups, or consultations would have helped the instructors consider other options for using clickers than the ones that aligned with their existing teaching practices.

Some instructors have “teachable moments” of their own when using clickers, finding out from the results of a well-chosen clicker question that their explanations of certain topics were not making sense to students.  This can lead instructors change their teaching practices to include more formative assessment of student learning.

What ideas do you have for helping instructors consider student-centered teaching practices (with or without clickers) in ways that make sense in their particular teaching contexts?

Regarding the C³ framework, it seems to me that the framework describes a single continuum, not three potentially independent continuums.  This single continuum would have mastery goals, student-centeredness, and student control at one end and performance goals, teacher-centeredness, and teacher control at the other end.  If the framework really describes three potentially independent continuums, I would like to hear about an instructor that had mastery goals but was teacher-centered or a student-centered instructor with performance goals, for example.

One of the student comments reported in the article stood out to me as a reason for not participating in class that I hadn’t heard before: “I do not want to seem like I am trying to hog class time.”  I often hear that students are hesitant to speak out in class for fear of being wrong or of having a perspective not shared by their peers.  This idea of deference to other students’ learning opportunities is a new one in my experience, although it makes sense to me, particularly with certain students.