Wireless student response systems (“clickers”) Why use them in your teaching? How to succeed when you do. Dr. Douglas Duncan University of Colorado, Boulder

Part I What are “clickers” and why should you use them? Why even an outstanding lecture isn’t the best teaching…

What are “clickers”? An inexpensive wireless response system that enable teachers to instantly poll students’ answers to a multiple choice question. Every student has a transmitter. A simple receiver plugs into the teacher’s laptop and displays a histogram of student answers.

The technology of clickers is now simple and relatively inexpensive: Transmitters cost about $30 new, $10-15 used. Can be used for multiple courses; students usually buy them in the bookstore. Receiver costs either $200 or $0. Extremely light and portable. Software is free and easy to use.

Why Use Clickers? 1.Rapid, accurate feedback to both you and your students. 2.Students learn less in lectures than we usually assume. Interactive questioning changes your class to make students more active and accountable for their own learning. 3.Some subjects are “touchy” and students hesitate to give opinions orally or by raising hands. Clicker responses are anonymous to students neighbors and produce more honest response. 4.It makes teaching more fun! (though possibly scary at first…) 5.Class attendance will typically increase 10-20%.

It’s NOT about the clicker. It’s about what you have your students do.

We’ve been teaching the same way for a long time… 2000 years ago Today How effective are we? …and how do we know?

How well do students learn in lecture? A cautionary tale…. about a violin…. From Carl Weiman’s* “Physics of Everyday Life” class. * Nobel prize winner AND good teacher

(b) Only 10% of students gave the correct answer. Fifteen minutes later in the same lecture! That was an anecdote… Now for data

Over the last 20 years, a powerful methodology has been developed to study teaching and learning. It is based on the idea that an oral exam is an excellent way to probe if a student really understands. Can you give oral exams to 1000s of students? No, but you can do this: 1. Hundreds of interviews with students 2. Determine right and common wrong answers (misconceptions) to important questions 3. Construct a multiple-choice test where the wrong answers are commonly believed misconceptions* 4. Give the test to thousands of students *e.g. Drop a heavy ball and a light ball. Which falls faster?

Suppose that a teacher is 1.Enthusiastic! 2.Prepared and organized. 3.A master of the subject and loves it. 4.Clear with explanations. 5.Stimulates thought and interest; cares if students “get it.” (These are the top qualities valued by students, according to educational research). and teaches purely by lecturing. What percentage of all the material taught in a semester do the students thoroughly learn?

R. Hake, ”…A six-thousand-student survey…” AJP 66, (‘98). = post-pre 100-pre traditional lecture Force Concept Inventory In a traditional lecture class, students learn about 25% of the concepts (that they don’t already know).

Twenty-five percent?! My students don’t score 25% on their exams. -I didn’t say they did. I said that no more than 25% achieve thorough learning in a class based only on lecture. Many students who do well on exams do not reach very deep understanding. Many exams don’t probe deeply. here’s an example…

It is very important that you learn about traxoline. Traxoline is a new form of zionter. It is monotilled in Ceristanna. The Ceristannians gristerlate large amounts of fevon and then bracter it to quasel traxoline. Traxoline may well be one of our most lukized snezlaus in the future because of our zionter lescelidge. The Monotillation of Traxoline attributed to Judy Lanier DIRECTIONS: Answer the following sentences in complete sentences. 1.What is traxoline? 2.Where is traxoline monotilled? 3.How is traxoline quaselled? 4.Why is it important to know about traxoline?

PowerPoint doesn’t fix this Fancy videos, applets shown in class, demonstrations don’t fix this Lecturing as well as Carl Sagan or Jay Leno doesn’t fix this The problem is not the lecturer. The problem is…

Teaching by telling is surprisingly ineffective - if you want students to master concepts. Students minds must be active to learn.

Traditional Model of Education Instruction via transmission Individual Content Is false!

End of Part I (Part II will explain how you can increase learning beyond what any lecture can achieve.)

Part II How you can increase learning beyond what any lecture can achieve.

Interactive “Peer Discussion” of conceptual questions forces students to talk and reason during class. Clickers make doing this easy. Here’s an example:

Two sample conceptual questions: 1. What happens to the spectrum in the front of the room if I put a red filter into the beam? A.Blue gets through, the other colors disappear B.Red gets through, the other colors disappear C.All the colors turn red D.It depends on which side of the prism I put the red filter

2. Consider a tiny acorn. A log from that tree weighs 10,000x as much as the acorn. Where has MOST of the mass of the old, dead logs come from? A. Sunlight B. Water C. Dirt D. Minerals in the soil E. The air Then peer discuss

Suppose half think the correct answer and half don’t. Clickers let you immediately see that. What should a good teacher do? Explain again, in a different context? That’s good, but even better is peer instruction: Let students talk to their neighbors and figure out the answer.

If you let groups of 3 students figure out for themselves (turn left; turn right; talk)… 90% of the time peer instruction leads a group to the correct answer. Only 10% of the time to the wrong answer. AND when tested on an exam students remember significantly more if they figured the answer out themselves.

If you all were in a room where you could discuss with your peers, you would really notice the excitement! It’s sort of like at a professional meeting – during coffee or cocktails. Students never see us in that setting!

6 CO H 2 O → C 6 H 12 O O H 2 O Carbon dioxide water glucose (sugar) oxygen water Photosynthesis The correct answer is “The Air.” Carbon dioxide from the air!

= post-pre 100-pre red = traditional, blue = interactive engagement Physics learning at the University of Colorado leads the US! The graph shows the fraction of everything taught students learn thoroughly during the semester. Red and blue histogram bars are for 52 classes throughout the US. F01 F99 F04 F05 S05 F03 S04F07 © Copyright Steven Pollock 2007 Traditional lecture (popular professor) ClickersClickers + tutorials Mazur – 10 years What difference does interactive engagement make?

Peer instruction reveals your students’ assumptions and arguments, which often are not what you expect. Fish is Fish… One of the “fishy friends” is actually a tadpole. He promises that when he can go on land he will report back what he sees. He sees amazing creatures called “birds,” that have wings and feathers and fly through the air. His friend the fish imagines what he’s been told…

And there are animals called “cows,” that have udders and eat grass…

These are your students! Knowing their assumptions is invaluable to good teaching.

It is enormously valuable when teachers wander around and listen to students arguments while they debate a provocative question. This lets you “see inside their heads.”

This kind of teaching means that you will be more engaged! It makes teaching more interesting, especially if you have taught for many years.

End of part II

Part III Best and Worst practices with clickers

Bloom’s Taxonomy

Students in classes that promote discussion rate clickers as more useful

This style of teaching means more work for students than just taking notes. It means they have to talk to the person next to them. Who they may think is an idiot. Without explanation students protest. Real student quote: “I expected you to teach me, I didn’t expect to have to learn!” Teachers must explain why they are teaching this way, or students will not be happy! -- and they should discuss what it means to learn

Keys to clicker success [the next 3 slides are on a 2-sided “Tips for Clicker Use”.pdf file ] 1.You must must must explain why you are using them! 2. Practice before using with students. 3. Have your own goals clearly in mind. 4. Discuss grading. Award credit for clicker use. If student participation is a goal, give partial credit for wrong answers. (e.g. 1 pt, 2 pt) Clickers = 10% of class grade is a good number.

Keys to clicker success (continued) 5. Start with a few clicker questions per class and increase when comfortable 6.Questions must relate to the heart of your course. Vary the complexity (“Bloom level”) 7.Clicker questions must relate to exam questions. 8.Questions should encourage discussion. 30% - 70% correct before peer discussion is ideal. not too easy!

Keys to clicker failure 1. Fail to explain why you are using them. 2. Use them for attendance. 3. Don’t have students talk with each other. 4. Use only factual recall questions. 5. Don’t make use of the student response information. 6. Fail to discuss what learning means or the depth of learning you expect. Metacognition. 7. Think of clickers as a testing device, rather than a device to inform learning. If you don’t really believe the data I’ve presented about the need for student-centered learning…. Don’t Use Clickers.

Metacognition – thinking about thinking One of the ways in which experts differ most from novices: understanding what leads to learning recognizing when I understand your students are novices The A student and the B- student: “I clicked exactly what he clicked…but he got an A and I only got a B- …” No brain – No gain!

These are quotes recorded by Angel Hoekstra, who is competing a sociology Ph. D. thesis on student clicker use.

Astronomy student comments… “I like clicker questions because it helps me understand key concepts and it makes me read the chapters in the book. I think clickers are critical to learning more information about the topic being taught.” (astronomy) “It’s not that I like [clickers], as a matter of fact, I hate them; but I think that they’re really useful.” Student did not specify why. (astronomy)

From Journalism students… “A lot of people hate [clickers] because they say it is the only reason that they go [to class,] but that is bullshit. They just want to skip [class] without losing ‘points.’ I like the interaction [clickers incite], it helps me know what I need to study more. Most kids that don’t like them, I feel, don’t have too many ‘solid’ reasons [for] why.”

Some suggestions for choosing a clicker system: Ease of FACULTY use should be a top priority. The SIMPLER the clickers the happier you will be. You probably do NOT want text input clickers. If your clicker allows text input, who will read and analyze it?! What will you do with the students who make up new text because they don’t like your instructions? Stick to A,B, C input. At the University of Colorado we tested clickers by dropping them and pouring coffee on them. We also tested faculty with the software. We chose iClicker. ( Only one system per campus!

It’s NOT about the clicker. It’s about what you have your students do.

Addison Wesley - (new edition coming) Summary of clicker advice: My work is partly supported by the NSF under Grant No , a CCLI Phase III Grant for the Collaboration of Astronomy Teaching Scholars (CATS) Program.

Questions? 1.Will I cover less material if I use clickers and peer instruction? 2.How long should conceptual questions take to answer (how complex should they be)? 3.How do I write good questions? 4.What “credit” should I give?

How to get good clicker questions? Effective multiple-choice questions have believable “distracters.” 51 1)Talking with other instructors that have taught the course in the past. 2)Talking with your students one-on-one before class, after class, during office hours. 3)Using student responses to open- ended questions that you include in HW and exams. 4)Asking your students to come up with answers that will be used as the choices. 5)Use researched and documented student misconceptions.

Variation in complexity of Questions New users & experienced users

Are we sure that peer instruction produces genuine learning? M. K. Smith et al. (U of Colorado, Science, Jan 2009)