Clicker

I started using personal response systems (a.k.a., “clickers,” as they are often affectionately known) in my library instruction sessions during the fall of 2006. The instructional technology group at Bucknell University where I currently work hosted a guest speaker, Richard Rogers (Prof. of Economics, University of Massachussetts at Amherst), who talked about how he was using clickers for several purposes, but mainly to keep students actively engaged during lectures. After listening to him, I was anxious to experiment with clickers in my next instructional session. 

It took me a few sessions of experimenting with the clickers to find a rhythm that worked for me — the right amount of time to spend on each question, the amount of discussion in proportion to the percent of students who got the question right/wrong, what percentage of a class should be spent with the clickers vs. some other activity. There is no pat answer to any of those questions. If you are considering using clickers, expect a period of adjustment.

I quickly became a convert. With the clickers, I could easily see general patterns of knowledge in a particular class. How many students understand how to read citations? Do students know how to track down a full-text article after finding a citation? Do they know how to order materials through inter-library loan? 

More importantly, students — and their professor — are able to see how little they know. Often, faculty feel like they don’t need to spend their own class time working on students’ research skills because they (mistakenly) believe students are learning those skills elsewhere. (Yet too often, we hear from faculty that students are using the “wrong” sources or “bad” sources for research.) Having the faculty member see that only 10% of students in a class understand how to find an article is eye opening — and it led to a surge in the number of sessions scheduled the following semester. (Another question that proved to be quite useful was asking students how many research workshops they had had before. For classes with primary enrollment of juniors and seniors, faculty were shocked to see that their library instruction session was often the first for most students.) 

How are others using clickers in the classroom? What has been your greatest success with the clickers?

This post is tagged

This post was written by Abby Clobridge