Using Classroom Clickers To Engage Every Student

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Interview

Using Classroom Clickers To Engage Every Student

9/24/2008

By Linda L Briggs

"With clickers, you're giving every student a voice, even the introverts," according to Edna Ross, a resource teaching professor and the chair of the University Instructional Technology Committee in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, speaking about classroom response systems.

Ross, who is speaking in November at the first-ever conference on clickers in the classroom,
led the effort to bring classroom response devices into classrooms at the University of Louisville. , In the last five years or so, she has begun using the devices in her classrooms with great success.

Ross, whose courses include introductory psychology, developmental psychology, and the history of systems psychology, has taught for more than 30 years. We spoke with her recently about how clickers in the classroom can help to engage students, particularly--though not exclusively--in large lecture situations.

Campus Technology: Can you describe how you use clickers in class?

Ross: I teach as many as 350 students at a time, freshmen students who are often coming from a high school classroom environment where the maximum class size was 30. All of a sudden they're stuck in a classroom with 350--that is massive culture shock for most incoming freshmen.

I have found that using clickers allows them to have their voices heard, allows them to participate in lecture discussions without exposing ... perhaps ... a minority viewpoint to ridicule or criticism. Students are far more open with clickers. We actually have, dare I use the term, "fun" in class.

CT: It sounds like you've seen great success with these devices.

Ross: Yes, I have. It encourages students to come to class, for one thing. As I said, coming from a 30-person high school class, all of a sudden they're stuck in this [huge] college class; students may feel detached or alienated. [They may think], What difference does it make if I attend? With clickers, I make it more interactive and more engaging. They get reinforced. There are rewards for showing up.

CT: What are specific ways that you use clickers in class?

Ross: I use the clickers in several ways. One way is to train students--"shape" is the psychological term--to read the textbook and know the lecture material before they come to class.

I'm talking about freshmen here in a large class. They're coming from a high school environment where reading the textbook wasn't necessarily something they did. All of a sudden, I'm requiring them to read this college-level book and have it read before they come to a large lecture class.

To train them, I have clicker questions on the material that they should have read before they came to class. It's really a clicker quiz. And some of those questions are on exams, so that makes them pay attention too. It's not just extraneous material.