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!)

Chris Heard, associate professor of religion at Pepperdine University, commented on my recent Inside Higher Ed interview, describing some of the advantages of leveraging existing student mobile devices (cell phones, smart phones, laptops) as part of classroom response systems.  He also described his very effective use of Wordle to generate a word cloud of students responses to the prompt “The Bible is…”

Dr. Heard makes some great points, and I made a comment or two on his blog, comments I’ll reproduce here:

Thanks for commenting on my interview.  I agree with your points about leveraging existing mobile devices as part of classroom response systems.  I, too, suspect that dedicated “clicker” devices may be on the way out.  Some instructors don’t like their students to use cell phones and laptops during class since they provide students with easy distractions, of course.  But I hear more and more from instructors who are interested in letting students tap into the Internet to bring outside resources inside the classroom.  I’m participating in the “iPhone conference” at Abilene Christian University this weekend, and I hope that we’ll have some great discussions exploring these issues.

Another point that I think is important to make is that many faculty members are hesitant to adopt new technology in the classroom unless the technology is very reliable and very easy to use.  Your example of using Wordle to generate a word cloud is a great one, but until tools exist to automate such things, many faculty members won’t be interested in pursuing that kind of classroom interaction.  (I’m glad to say that ACU has developed a word cloud tool for iPhones!)  One advantage that clickers currently have is that many vendors have very reliable and very easy to use systems that can be used “off the shelf.”  That has led to greater faculty use of classroom response systems.  I think that’s a good thing, since CRSs can facilitate and enhance so many different types of pedagogies.

One more comment: In writing my book, I anticipated that the technology of classroom response systems would change over time, but I wanted my book to remain useful.  Thus, in talking about various applications of CRSs in the classroom, I only assumed very basic functionality–the ability to rapidly collect student responses to multiple-choice (and perhaps free-response) questions and generate a bar chart showing those responses.  So I hope the book is useful to instructors no matter what kind of technology they use.