The book reps have been by recently, and one of the things they’re pushing hard is the adoption of student response systems, often called clickers. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a lot like the “ask the audience” segment of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Students are asked a question by the instructor, andasked to “buzz in” with the answer. Implementations vary – students may have handheld remotes, or they may submit their response with a computer located at their desk, but the effect is the same. It’s supposed to promote reflection – thinking about the material being presented – in the classroom, and increase student learning.
Why are the book reps so keen on promoting clickers? Students buy the remotes along with the textbook for the course, thus netting the book publisher another $40 or so per book sold. Plus, it’s another club to beat over the heads of the used booksellers, who won’t likely have the class-required remotes available.
Textbook prices being what they are, I’m not exactly willing to saddle my students with a much larger book bill (they pay enough for textbook, lab books, and calculator – even getting some of the stuff used) without some nice results demonstrating a clear benefit in the chemistry classroom. As luck would have it, this month’s Journal of Chemical Education has a study comparing clickers to another popular classroom extra – WebCT’s online quizzing. The reseatchers compared students who had access to online quizzes (outside the classroom), students who had in-class clickers, students who had access to both, and students who had access to neither.
On normal tests (written by the teacher), the students who had access to online quizzes (questions chosen by the teacher) did better than other students. This makes sense, since the student is getting used to the testing style of the teacher when taking the online quizzes. The groups with only clickers actually performed more poorly on the tests than all other groups – even the group with access to neither online quizzes nor clickers. Performance, from best to worst, went this way.
- Online quizzes
- Online quizzes and clickers
- Neither online quizzes nor clickers
- Clickers
So the clickers actually hurt grades! “Negative learning”? (Oddly enough, when the students were asked about clickers, over 80% responded that clickers helped them “reinforce what they learned in class”, and over 70% said the clcikers “helped [them] learn”.)
Perhaps the students became too confident about their knowledge in class and simply did not study as much outside of class compared to the students who weren’t clicking in answers during lecture? (The clickers affect attitude more than retention, perhaps.)
On a national chemistry test, the researchers found that clickers were better than either the combination of clickers and online quizzes or for online quizzes alone – but that this performance was not significantly better than that of students who didn’t have access to either clickers or online quizzes. I’m not sure what to make of that, really.
At any rate, I don’t think I’ll be saddling my students with a much larger textbook bill – at least not without better results than seen here.
Reference: Bunce, D. M.; VandenPlas, J. R.; Havanki, K. L.; J. Chem. Educ.; 2006, 83 (3), 488-493.