Continuing my reports from the contributed paper session on teaching with clickers I helped coordinate at the Joint Mathematics Meetings back in January…

“Using Prediction and Classroom Voting via Clickers to Address Students’ Overreliance on the Representativeness Heuristic,” Tami Dashley, University of Texas-El Paso [Slides]

Tami Dashley is a graduate student in math education and a student of Kien Lim, one of the organizers of the contributed paper session. She shared some of her thesis research, an investigation into the connection between classroom voting with clickers and certain misconceptions students have about probability. Her work focuses on the representativeness heuristic, which she defines as “determining the likelihood for events based on how well an outcome represents some aspect of its parent population.”

Tami gave the following example: Suppose you toss a coin six times, getting a sequence of heads (H) and tails (T). Which of the following is more likely to occur: TTHHTH or HTTHHH? Someone using the representativeness heuristic would say that TTHHTH is more likely to occur since it includes an equal amount of heads and tails, just like the coin does. The other option includes more heads than tails, so it would not seem as likely to someone using the representativeness heuristic. Actually, both of those outcomes are equally likely (each occurring with probability 1/64), so the representative heuristic is a misleading one in this example.

The issue is that the representativeness heuristic is useful in some cases, but not useful in all cases. The misconception that many students have is that it’s always useful.

How to help students stop over-relying on the representativeness heuristic? Tami has been investigating the use of prediction questions, ones that ask students to predict an outcome or probability without actually computing anything. For example, students might be asked to determine which of several outcomes is most likely to occur. Since students need not be as precise when responding to prediction questions, they have some cognitive processing power freed up to focus on concepts. Clicker questions are a natural match here, since they allow students to commit to their predictions and compare their predictions to those of their peers. Then discussion of the incorrect answer choices provides an opportunity to deal with misconceptions.

Tami conducted her research in a high school setting, using three groups of students. Her “control” group received a lesson exploring the representativeness heuristic that didn’t ask the students to predict any probabilities. A second group was asked several prediction questions but didn’t use clickers to respond to the questions. The third group used clickers to respond to prediction questions during the lesson. Tami used pre- and post-tests to determined the efficacy of these three different lessons.

Tami found that her “control” group did pretty well on the post-test compared to the two experimental groups. However, most of their success came from what she called a “learned response.” In this case, many of the students picked up on the fact that “all of the above outcomes are equally likely” is often the correct answer to questions exploring the representativeness heuristic. (These are what students might call trick questions!) When Tami looked at performance on questions where “all of the above outcomes are equally likely” was, in fact, not the correct answer, the prediction-with-voting group performed better than the control and prediction-only groups.

I was very impressed with Tami’s research design and the subtlety with which she explored student misconceptions in this teaching context. I don’t believe that Tami has published this work yet, but I look forward to reading it when she does.

Image: “Heads and Tails” by Flickr user canonsnapper, Creative Commons licensed

Last month I blogged about a new product (then in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief.  This product allows multiple students to interact with a PowerPoint slide projected on the big screen in a classroom.  Each student needs his or her own wireless mouse to do so.  Each student has a unique cursor on the big screen, allowing them to respond to clicker-style multiple-choice questions embedded in PowerPoint slides.  Check out the video below.

As I noted in my earlier post, this system has a very significant flaw as a replacement for a “traditional” clicker system.  Since students can see how their peers are responding to questions, it’s impossible for students to respond independently.  That means that many students will likely wait to see how their peers respond before jumping on the bandwagon and selecting the most popular answer.

Mouse Mischief is now out of beta, and a colleague sent me a link to the above video.  Now that I’ve seen the promotional video, I’m starting to see more potential in Mouse Mischief.  Not as a replacement for clickers–my earlier concern about independent voting still stands–but as a way to allow students to interact with text and images shared with the class.  Imagine sharing a portion of reading with students and having them take turns highlighting quotes that support a particular argument, with each student discussing his or her quote with the class.  Or showing students a complex medical diagnostic image and having them take turns circling abnormalities and sharing possible causes for or effects of those abnormalities.

Given how the system works, having students respond simultaneously to questions doesn’t make much sense.  However, having students interact with text or images in sequence has some real potential.  There are other ways to implement these kinds of activities–having students take turns coming up to the instructor’s computer or interactive white board or having students use laptops to log in to the same Google Doc–but in some teaching contexts, Mouse Mischief might be a very practical option.

What do you think?  Do you see applications for this kind of tool in your classrooms?

Image: “Wireless Mouse” by Flickr user kengo / Creative Commons licensed

Have you seen the new product (in beta) from Microsoft called Mouse Mischief?  I heard about it on Twitter a few weeks ago.  It’s an add-on to PowerPoint aimed squarely at the K12 market, but it’s of potential interest to those in higher education looking for alternatives to clickers.

To use Mouse Mischief as a classroom response system, a teacher embeds a special multiple-choice question slide in her PowerPoint presentation.  Each student in the classroom needs a mouse connected (wirelessly, no doubt) to the teacher’s computer.  When the question slide is shared with the class, each student sees a unique mouse cursor on the big screen.  They manipulate these cursors with their mice, using them to click on their answers to the question at hand.  The program then provides a bar chart showing the distribution of student responses.

I hear a lot about clicker alternatives that involve student cell phones or smart phones or laptops, but this is the first tool I’ve seen that uses mice as student input devices.  That’s a clever idea, but it has a very significant flaw.  Since the students can see their peers’ mouse cursors on the screen as they answer, students can’t answer independently!  This means that you’ll see the same lemming effect you see with hand-raising.  Once students start to figure out which cursors belong to the “smart kids,” they’ll just wait for those kids to answer and copy them.

Given this very significant flaw, I can’t really see how this tool would be useful.  It’s better than a show of hands, I guess, since it records student responses, allowing teachers to hold students accountable for their class participation.  That’s a good thing.  But the lack of independent responses is a real deal-breaker in my view.  What are your thoughts on Microsoft Mouse Mischief?

Note: I’ve had a couple of problems with this blog recently–the RSS feed stopped working and I haven’t had any time to post.  I’ve now fixed both problems.

I’m a huge fan of the World’s Technology Podcast from the BBC and PRI.  Clark Boyd puts together a great collection of technology stories from around the world every week–not the usual stories about the latest gadgets, but stories about how technology is impacting society and culture around the world.  Great stuff.

A couple of months back Clark ran a story on Chinese students using cell phones to cheat.  I tweeted Clark and suggested that he take a look at some of the positive ways teachers are using cell phones in the class room.  I recommended he take a look at what Greg Kulowiec has been doing in his 9th grade history classes in Massachusetts.  I’ve blogged about Greg’s use of Poll Everywhere, and Greg’s posted a great video showing how he uses this text-messaging-based response system to ask his students ethical questions about the Holocaust.

Well, Clark Boyd took me up on my recommendation and interviewed Greg about his use of technology in his classes.  The interview ran near the beginning of episode 256 of Clark’s podcast.  Greg talks about how he had his students use their cell phones during class to call people they knew and quiz them about the US Constitution and how he uses his students’ cell phones as part of a classroom response system to engage them during class.

Greg also describes a couple of ways to leverage his students’ cell phones’ camera functions.  He had his students take photos during a class trip to the New England Aquarium and send them to Greg’s Evernote account for later use in an Animoto video, for instance.  He also plans to have his students create their own Evernote accounts so they can take photos of references as they do research, send those photos to their Evernote accounts, and use Evernote’s tagging ability to organize their research notes.  Very cool stuff.  I think it’s time I signed up for an Evernote account.

Props to Clark Boyd for being open to listener suggestions and to Greg Kulowiec for being willing to share his innovative uses of technology.  You can follow Greg’s continuing experiments on his blog, The History 2.0 Classroom.

Last week teacher Lisa Short of Gaithersburg Middle School in Maryland shared her perspectives on educational technology with the education committee of the United States House of Representatives.  Education Week covered this presentation, and you can see an eight-minute video of Short’s presentation below.  The first half of her presentation is focused on interactive whiteboards.  The clickers are demonstrated just after 5 minutes in.

Short’s presentation caught my eye because she demonstrated classroom response system technology to the committee, arguing that the anonymity the system provides her students allows her to more accurate assess their misconceptions and prior knowledge since they can answer her clicker questions honestly without fear of embarrassment in front of their peers.

Short also mentioned that between class sessions, she can see which students miss her questions, providing her useful data with which to evaluate her lessons.  For instance, do some students have particular learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile, and so on) that she could address more effectively in future lessons?  And if most of her students miss a question, she knows she’ll need to return to that topic in the next class session.

I’m glad that this House committee had a chance to learn about educational technologies like clickers and interactive whiteboards.  I wish that Short had mentioned that the results of clicker questions can be used immediately to make teaching choices, not just between classes.  The capacity to facilitate such agile teaching is a strength of the technology.

Also, the fact that all of the members of the committee answered her clicker question (about the percent of schools in the US with interactive whiteboards) correctly was a little disappointing, since it meant their was no opportunity to talk about peer instruction.  However, that result did set up her punchline effectively–that only 16% of US schools have interactive whiteboards but 70% of UK schools do!

I usually focus on the use of classroom response systems at the university level here on this blog, but I have to share a video recently posted by Greg Kulowiec, who teaches 9th grade history in Massachusetts.  In the video, Kulowiec asks his students some challenging ethical questions about the Holocaust.  His students respond via text-messaging using Poll Everywhere, and the results are displayed on screen for the class to see.  You’ll note that Kulowiec is using a Wiimote to interact with his projector screen, which is pretty cool.

A few pedagogical observations on the video:

• These questions, asking students to consider various people’s responsibility in the Holocaust, are potentially very engaging ethical questions.  I can see these questions generating a lot of small-group or classwide discussion in high school or college settings.
• Kulowiec gets the discussion started in his class in a couple of different ways on the video.  In one instance, he asks the student who disagreed with most of his peers to argue for his answer choice.  In another instance, he asks for volunteers to argue for the most popular answer choice.  Considering arguments for and against each response is a useful approach to take for these questions and many others.  Having students voice those arguments is even more useful as it engages the students in the act of critical thinking.
• You’ll note that the bar chart showing the responses is visible to the students and changes as the responses come in.  I don’t know if Kulowiec had a particular pedagogical reason for letting his students see the votes as they came in, but this is generally a risky way to use a classroom response system.  It can lead to a “lemming effect”–once one of the answer choices gets a slight lead, many students select or switch to that answer choice out of peer pressure, leading to less independent thinking among students and less accurate assessments for instructors.

Thanks to Greg Kulowiec for sharing this video.  I find that observing classroom response systems in action (live or on video) can lead to productive discussions among instructors about teaching choices one can make when using classroom response systems.

Marty Williams recently asked in a comment here about resources for teachers in K12 settings interested in using clickers.  I am asked this question from time to time, and my usual response is that since I’ve focused my efforts at the college and university level, I’m not as familiar with K12 clicker use.  I suspect that much of good clicker question design and good clicker pedagogy at the college level translate well to high school settings, if not all K12 settings.  I would be glad to hear feedback from K12 teachers on the ideas in my book to see if I’m right about that.

One connection point between college settings and K12 settings is the education of pre-service teachers.  Clicker use in courses for undergraduate education majors have two potential benefits.  One is that clickers can enhance the learning experience for these students in both education courses and in subject courses–math, chemistry, literature, and so on.  (Here’s an example.)  Another is that as clicker use becomes more common in K12 settings, future teachers will benefit from knowing how to use clickers effectively.  I would be interested in hearing from those who prepare future teachers how they have used clickers in these ways.

Given the interest in resources for using clickers in K12 settings, I thought I would share the few resources with which I’m familiar, while encouraging readers to add to this list in the comments below.

Teacher Learning of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment is an NSF-sponsored project headed by Ian Beatty and William Leonard of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro studies “how secondary science and mathematics teachers learn to use [clickers] to implement a specific pedagogical approach called Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA).”  I interviewed Ian for my podcast last year, and in the interview he talked about some of the lessons he learned through the project regarding professional development around clickers.  He’s also co-authored a paper on the project:

Beatty, I. D. & Gerace, W. J. (2009). Technology-enhanced formative assessment: A research-based pedagogy for teaching science with classroom response technology. Journal of Science Education & Technology.

Another reference of potential use is this 2007 literature review of classroom response systems in elementary and secondary education:

Penuel, W. R., Boscardin, C. K., Masyn, K., & Crawford, V. M. (2007). Teaching with student response systems in elementary and secondary education settings: A survey study. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 55(4).

Also, in a comment here on this blog, Jeff Stowell pointed out that some classroom response system vendors make available clicker questions aligned with state standards.  He linked to question banks from Turning Technologies and eInstruction.

Now I turn it over to you.  What resources for using clickers in K12 settings have you found?  Please share in the comments.  I know that there are several K12 teachers who read this blog who would be interested in what you have to share.

I finally got around to watching Bill Gates’ recent TED talk.  This is the talk you may have heard about where he released mosquitoes into the audience.  Well, after spending the first half of the talk speaking about the challenge of defeating malaria, Gates spent the last half addressing the question, How do you make great teachers?  He made a couple of points that made me think of classroom response systems.

One was that he praised the teacher at a KIPP school he recently visited for engaging all of the students in her classroom throughout the class period.  He argued that more classrooms should be like this, where students can’t goof off or not pay attention.  I would argue that classroom response systems are one great tool for helping teachers (at the K12 level or at the college level) keep all students in a class engaged with the material.  Since all students can be expected to respond to a clicker question, not just the two or three students who put their hands up first, clickers can be used to help keep all students on task.

Another was that he indicated that in some school districts, test score data that could be used to help teachers identify strengths and areas for improvement isn’t shared with teachers!  This surprised me.  If there’s existing data on student learning that teachers could use to improve their effectiveness, why not share that data with the teachers?

This reminded me of a conversation I had with an elementary school principle at the recent ConnectEd Summit.  (Yes, I’m still talking about that…)  She was looking at my book and discussing with me how clickers might be useful in a K3 setting.  One point she made was that classroom response systems have the potential to provide her teachers with useful data on student learning, particularly if the questions used were tied to state or national standards.  A teacher could use the data generated from one day to help determine the plan for the next day.

So if anyone reading this happens to know Bill Gates, please let him know that I would be glad to talk with him about how classroom response systems might help meet the challenge he outlined in his TED talk!