Teaching with Clickers

1. Teaching with Clickers Making Learning Active Suggestions provided by Derek Bruff and Stephanie Chasteen

2. Engage Students Ask a question, then ask students to discuss it with their neighbors to convince each other of their answer. They click in and we discuss the question as a class. • Students talk to their peers • Students get feedback on their performance in a private way • The instructor gets instant feedback on what the class is understanding

3. Games for Review • This is a pretty traditional place for games to show up in college teaching, although the games involved are usually just variations of Jeopardy or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. • Clickers can certainly enhance these kinds of games!

4. Team Competitions • Again, these aren’t very complicated games, usually involving nothing more than putting students in teams and keeping track of which team has answered the most questions correctly. • Most of the clicker vendors provide some tools for doing this kind of thing, sometimes with fun themes (like car races or horse races).

5. Classroom Experiments • This term can mean different things, but Derek Bruff (Assistant Director, Vanderbilt Center for Teaching) uses it to describe the kinds of activities sometimes seen in social science courses (particularly psychology and economics) where students generate data that supports classic results. • An economics instructor (Cheung 2008) used a classroom response system to collect and analyze data generated by having his students play the “ultimatum game” to make some points about motivation and generosity. • Bill Hill used clickers in his psychology courses to collect student data in a memory experiment. In both cases, there exist good experimental data in the literature, but having students generate very similar data “live” during class offers some pedagogical advantages.

6. Question Trees • This is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” kind of game in which students determine how the class will proceed by responding to a series of branching clicker questions. • Hinde and Hunt describe something like this in David Banks’, Audience Response Systems in Higher Education (2006). • This type of game taps into two important components of modern game design: simulation and player-influenced narratives.

7. Resources • Derek Bruff’s blog: Teaching with Classroom Response Systems • Stephanie Chasteen’s blog: sciencegeekgirl • Bruff, D. (2009). Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. • Classroom Response System (“Clickers”) Bibliography (Vanderbilt University)