I found provocative PG’s comment that using clickers almost gives the impression that the teacher isn’t interested in teaching, in part because it points to a deeper issue here. If my job as a teacher is to share content with my students, and it’s up to them to spend lecture time paying attention, taking notes, and making sense of that content as best they can, then I’ve set students like PG up to succeed. Here’s a student who can pay attention, take notes, and reflect on what they’re learning during lecture.

The problem is that students like PG are relatively rare. Most students can’t pay attention and take notes and process what they’re hearing fast enough to keep up with the teacher. So instead they just take notes and hope to figure the material out later. Some of them do figure it out later, certainly, but in this situation, the teacher has put pretty much the entire burden of assimilating the information onto the students.

Another approach is consider it my job as a teacher to design a learning experience for students that will help them make sense of the material. The students have some responsibility for learning (coming to class, paying attention, participating, turning their brains on, and so on), but most of the responsibility for orchestrating the learning experience falls on me the teacher (not all, but more). So when I ask my students a clicker question, it’s because that I, as the educator at the front of the room, feel that the students need a chance to test their learning at that point in the class session. That decision might not work as well for students like PG, but it might be a great decision for many other students in the class.

And he has real statistics to back up claims that his method works.

I agree with Florine; I think it works better than old-style analog voting (which I’ve also tried) because you can immediately display the graph of the results, so it’s easier for everyone to get a sense of what the range of thought is before the discussion. There’s often an audible response when the initial responses are posted, and my class usually give a little cheer if the second vote is close to unanimous. They still haven’t forgotten the second vote that was unanimous and wrong, though.

One reason could be that with clickers your answer is not visible for the whole class to see. For one, students cannot copy each others answers (as they might when holding up hands), and it’s less intimidating for shy or insecure students to give their answer, even when they’re not sure it’s the right one.

With anything, it can be used in an ineffective manner. Chalkboards can definitely be useful, but once I had this professor that just copied stuff from the book right onto the board. So, the same can be true for the clickers. Also, I think it is important to think about the goals of the classtime. If the point is to cover material, these clickers would just get in the way. For my class, I encourage them to read outside of class and then we use the clickers to discuss the more complicated parts.

@Mike,

The cell phone clickers seems like a cool idea, I will have to check that out.