Clickers & Polling
Faculty used in-class polling either manually or electronically to check for understanding or opinion.
About
The ability to reach out to a group of students and find out just what they think about something is challenging: raised hands show simple binary answers, discussions can be dominated by one or two people, and calling on individual students can only occur serially. However, a polling system like clickers provides a way to simultaneously capture a wide variety of answers from everyone. If one then adds in a short peer-learning discussion, students can discuss and debate the logic of their answers, and when the re-ask happens, the public display of the whole classes’ answers can show the hoped for change in understanding. Faculty who teach large classes, particularly in STEM fields, find clickers great for testing smaller pieces of knowledge that are needed to inform larger concepts. In this regard, it is quite Bloomesque. Since many STEM fields have that kind of pyramidal structure of knowledge, it is not surprising that they are the largest adopters of this activity.
The original study's data and analysis for "Clickers & Polling" can be found on this link.
What Faculty Have To Say
Strengths (7)
- Provides instant feedback on student understanding
- Exposes and corrects their misconceptions and misunderstandings
- Students can answer anonymously, but not feel isolated
- The class can follow up with pair-share to discuss/debate their answers
- It encourages students to keep up with class readings
- It helps students stay engaged
- It helps faculty know when to slow down and when to move along
Weaknesses (7)
- Slows class down and eats up time
- Takes time to craft good questions
- Students over-prioritize the clicker question topics
- Even after, it is difficult to know who still needs assistance
- They can resent the built in attendance feature
- Cards/clickers can get lost or forgotten (a good reason to use socrative)
- Occasional technical glitches
Pedagogy Usage
Bucknell faculty was asked their best estimate for how often in the semester they used Clickers & Polling and the average class time it took.
Average Duration: 5 min (mode=5)
Remote Suggestions
Gathering live feedback from the class is extremely valuable, and very doable in a remote setting. The feedback is usualy most useful for the insructor to add clarifications or extension, if needed, but it is also a good temperature check on their learning. It may also be necessary to share the poll asynchronously to accomodate remote learners, and this can be done with a Moodle Feedback or Survey tool.
Resources for Additional Learning
Articles & Books
- Waking the Dead: Using interactive technology to engage passive listeners in the classroom, Rand W. Guthrie and Anna Carlin.
- Who wants to be… The use of a personal response system in statistics teaching. By E Wit.
- Efficacy of Personal Response Systems (“Clickers”) in Large, Introductory Psychology Classes, by Beth Morling, Meghan McAuliffe, Lawrence Cohen, & Thomas M. DiLorenzo.