Introduction

Why is it that every faculty member who is experienced with using clickers effectively swears by them?

Why are the students in classes using well-implemented clicker questions dramatically more engaged and asking more numerous and deeper questions?

Why do the students in these classes overwhelmingly recommend that clickers should be used in all lecture classes?

This guide was written to help instructors understand the answers to these questions, and to help them use personal response systems (“clickers”) in their classes in the most comfortable and pedagogically effective manner. The authors are involved in the Science Education Initiative at the University of Colorado and the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia. We have supported many different instructors as they introduced or refined the use of clickers into their courses, several of us have used clickers extensively in teaching, and we have observed a large number of classes – both those which use clickers and those which do not. Particularly relevant to this guide were our numerous observations of some expert “clicker-based” instructors. We have also carried out a number of studies on clicker use and their impact on students and on student opinions about their use.

The first point about clickers that must be emphasized is that clickers in themselves are not a solution to anything. Like a chalkboard, they can only serve to extend the capabilities of the instructor. Although clickers can be, and unfortunately often are, used primarily to encourage attendance, they are most effective when they are used expressly to facilitate intellectual engagement of the student and communication between student and instructor. When used this way, the amplification of a good instructor’s capabilities can transform a classroom and result in dramatically improved student learning, particularly in large classes. In the words of one instructor known to be an exceptionally good traditional lecturer when half way through his first term of using clickers:

This is great fun. My worst day using clickers is about as good as my best day using standard lectures [in the past].

An experienced insightful instructor when giving a traditional lecture can tell when many of the students are not engaged and can often tell when students do not understand the material. However, it is more difficult to know why they are disengaged and/or confused, and how to fix these problems. Clickers, when used well, can provide the why and how to fix for experienced instructors. For other instructors, in addition to serving those functions, clickers can also help them know much better when students are disengaged and confused.

It is essential to recognize that these benefits do not happen automatically when one introduces clickers to the classroom. These desirable outcomes are only achieved when the instructor thinks carefully about his or her instructional goals and how clicker questions and related discussion can help achieve those goals. In the remainder of this document, we will discuss the use of “clicker-questions” and how they can be used in educationally effective ways. These questions are normally multiple choice questions posed to the class, where each student in the class has their own clicker. Students register their answer by pushing the appropriate button, and a computer records their response. A histogram of responses can be shown to the whole class.