Clickers In The Classroom Views

General Goods

Jeffrey Henriques initially introduced a classroom response system--a clicker --into his courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during fall 2004 to encourage students to participate in the questions he would throw at them. The researcher and senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology adopted the technology as an alternative to asking students to raise their hands to answer questions in his classes. He found that a large number of students wouldn't respond.

Evaluation and Common Adoption The first type of clicker Henriques tried five years ago was an infrared device that worked like a TV remote. Students had to aim the device at a receiver in order to get their responses to register. Following a campus-wide evaluation process during 2006 and 2007, he switched to a radio frequency remote device, the Classroom Performance System (CPS) from eInstruction, which he used for a couple of years.

Most recently, during the summer of 2009 Henriques and other instructors and technologists at the university did another evaluation of clicker systems and have recommended adoption of the iagt;clicker classroom response system from a company by the same name. The setup, which consists of a base station that receives signals from the student devices and records them to software on the PC, works at a radio frequency of 915 MHz, which, the company said, won't interfere with campus WiFi technologies. It can handle input from up to 1,500 students per receiver and count 750 votes per second. When a user has voted, an LED on the hand unit turns green. A red flashing light tells the user to vote again. To save on battery use, the hand unit will shut off after 90 minutes of communicating with the base station; if it has been turned on accidentally, such as while in a backpack, it'll shut off after five minutes.

So, what's the point? What they don't do, Henriques said, is raise test scores. There's no distinguishable difference in overall class performance, nor in rating the usefulness of class lectures. But, he concluded, Clickers can be an effective way to get students engaged in the classroom and enthusiastic about learning.