Education Building

Though it seems like summer has hardly arrived, I’ve noticed that people are planning already for the fall semester.

If you are planning on using iClickers in your classroom this fall, now is the time to order the iClickers through the SFU bookstore. It’s the same process as ordering text books, which makes it easy. I recommend that you download the updated iClicker software from their site. The MAC and PC software were updated this Spring, with new features. You can get updated user guides on their site as well. If you have a clicker base unit, you are all set, and if not, you can contact Amy Severson (ajs [at] sfu [dot] ca) or 778-782-7245. iClicker has produced a short video (no audio) that gives you a basic preview of the software for delivering and reviewing questions.

Now is a good time to think about what kinds of questions you want to ask as well:

1. Tracking attitudes or opinions: ask questions that don’t have a right or wrong answer, but ask students to make a judgment based on their experience or what you’ve discussed or read in the classroom.
2. Exam questions: Practice questions from past exams can give students a sense of what might appear on the exam or where their gaps of knowledge might be.
3. Check in or Comprehension questions: Ask questions for which you’ve just provided the answer, to emphasize the importance of what you’ve said, or to help them apply what they’ve just been told.
4. Reminders: Asking questions based on pre-requisite or key points of the readings can trigger that background knowledge they’ll need to follow you on the next point (a useful reminder on the value of readings!)
5. Transitional questions: Rhetorical questions to spark their interest – they may not have the knowledge or background to answer the question, but it provides a bridge to the next topic.

Good luck in the new semester; you’ve got an opportunity to get to know your students, encourage application of knowledge, implement some active learning and give and receive feedback on student learning. Be prepared, and tell your students how your implementation will assist in their learning.

A round-up of some recent (and not so recent) postings and musing on clickers in the classroom.

Clickers are multiple choice question: how do you use them to encourage critical thinking? From the same author, more thoughts on using clickers in a statistics course.

This posting is short and with some very specific hints and tricks to using clickers. It offers opinions (but not lots of discussion) on topics such as how many questions you should ask per class, what to do if students forget their clickers, and aligning questions with specific learning goals.

Why using clickers just for attendance is not the ideal.

It comes down to writing effective questions for different situations or objectives.

I’ve been working my way through some interesting research and other resources on classroom response systems recently.

Bruff’s book offers useful practice-oriented support for instructors. He cites some useful concepts developed by Eric Mazur (peer instruction) and Ian Beatty et al. (agile teaching).  I appreciate the work for its focus on exposing learners’ misconceptions through thought provoking question and then responding to the resulting complexity through on-the-spot, in-the-moment facilitation.

Bruff  introduced me to the concept of  the “backchannel” – offering students ways of sending informal questions and comments to the instructor on-the-spot and in-the-moment. I had seen this activity in action at ETUG the other week, but I hadn’t made the connection to large-group lectures at the university.

Instructors, I think, would find the chapter on question types particularly helpful.

Here are the resources I’ve gathered so far:

Banks, D. (ed.) (2006). Audience response systems in higher education: Applications and cases. Hershey, PA: Information Science Publishing. Available online <http://proxy.lib.sfu.ca/login?url=http://www.netLibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summary&v=1&bookid=144620>.

Beatty, I.D. and Gerace, W.J. (2009). Technology-enhanced formative assessment: A research-based pedagogy for teaching science with classroom response systems. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 18. 146-162. Retrieved 3 Nov 2009 from <http://srri.umass.edu/publications/beatty-2009tef>.

Bruff, D. (2009). Teaching with classroom response systems: Creating active learning environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Available in print at SFU Library: LB 1027.23 B78 2009.

Crouch, C.H., Watkins, J., Fagan A.P., and Mazur, E. (2007). Peer instruction: Engaging students one-on-one, all at once. Research-based reform of university physics, 1(1). 1-55. Retrieved 3 Nov 2009 from <http://www.compadre.org/Repository/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=4990&DocID=241&DocFID=273&Attachment=1>

Mazur, E. (1997). Peer instruction: A user’s guide. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Available in print at SFU Library: QC 30 M345 1997.

Clickers have slowly been introduced in large (and medium sized) classes in the last two years. We asked one of our early adopters to do a presentation and talk on clicker use in her classroom. I pulled a few key ideas from her talk and my interpretation on them:

Types of questions
“Read studies in your field of common student misconceptions, and address these questions. “
In class questions and feedback demonstrate the faulty logic and give you the change to immediately dismantle the misconceptions and assumptions. These misconceptions can become enormous road blocks to students future learning.

“Write knowledge questions: based on information from readings, a past lecture or a few slides ago”
This ties in with keeping your questions aligned with your teaching objectives – while it may be fun to ask a off-beat or simply interesting question, your students may lose interest and faith in this technique if it does not relate to the learning and assessment described in your objectives and outline.

“Write predictive questions: show a slide with some facts or information, and ask a if/then question”
If you choose to describe an experiment or series of events, students will be far more interested in the result if they’ve used the clickers to predict the outcome. You can present a series of facts on one slide, and the ask – what was the outcome. If X were applied, what would the outcome be? This engages students in the material in a complex manner – they are shifting through knowledge and evidence to analyze the facts and apply their learning to a problem.

Students
“If you register your clicker as an instructor iclicker, and then lend it to a student, mysterious things will happen”
If you use the iClicker technology, you’ll receive one or two blue iClickers. They’re blue to remind you that they’re yours, not your students (who get a white clicker). You can program this clicker to advance PowerPoint slides, start and stop a clicker question, and display or hide the responses. If you do choose to program this iClicker, and lend it to a student, they won’t be able to answer the clicker questions, but will inadvertently create havoc with your presentation.

“The student – instructor dynamic will change”
If you use clickers, you can expect more office hours. Students are being shown misconceptions or gaps in knowledge before the midterm or final, and some will use the knowledge to seek you out for answers (or with more questions!).

In addition, if the clickers are increasing your attendance (due to grades being assigned for answers), your student evaluations may go down initially. The students who would normally be reluctant or resistant are more likely to be in the classroom on the day you hand out the evaluation forms, and may express this opinion on the forms. That being said, the majority of the students do like the clickers and think that they improve their learning.

For more information on clicker use and implementation at SFU, go to this information page or email Amy Severson at ajs {at} sfu.ca.

The LIDC recently hosted a short demonstration of a clicker technology for faculty who are using clickers in the classroom this fall.

Clickers are also known as Personal Response Systems, and look like a simplified remote control. They can be used by students to answer questions in large classrooms, and their answers are automatically recorded by the instructor’s receiver at the front. Faculty are using them to assess student understanding of their readings, provoke discussion, provide a quick quiz and generally increase student engagement.

Those at the demonstration discussed how to make clickers worthwhile for students, the type of feedback that instructors can receive with these systems, and how to balance presentation of content with the clicker usage.

If you would like more information on clickers, please contact Amy Severson at ajs@sfu.ca or 778-782-7245

For other innovative services in the LIDC see Learning Technologies.