New 'clicker' manages college class attendance

By Catholic Online
11/17/2010
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

A new device, simply called a "clicker" for half a million college students, allows for a greater interaction in classrooms - as well as monitor attendance. It seems that naughty students intent on cutting class will have a much harder time with classroom clickers.

Although designed for educational purposes, there are even applications that convert iPads and BlackBerrys into similar devices. Studies have shown that using a mobile device that students are comfortable with helps with learning.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The New York Times reports that Northwestern University students are now using the device to participate in class by answering a variety of quiz questions. The device also automatically indicates if students attend class and if they arrive on time.

Said "clicker" is a palm-size, wireless device that looks like a TV remote. In class, students are often forced to answer quiz questions using the "clicker" nearly every 15 minutes, and audience responses are instantly displayed with colorful graphics on the class screen. The device even offers a way to indicate that you don't understand the lecture without having to raise your hand.

Some students displeased with this level of control by professors of their class experience -- but not all.

"I actually kind of like it," Jasmine Morris, a senior majoring in industrial engineering at Northwestern University, told the New York Times. "It does make you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you're supposed to be doing as a student."

One advantage for the device is that it can actually encourage students to participate in a more traditional way. When students use the device to vote on a particular question posed by the professor and then see that their opinion coincides with that of the majority of students in the class, they may be more inclined to discuss their views.

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Keywords: Clicker, college, attendance, participation

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1 - 2 of 2 Comments

Alberto Jacinto
2 years ago
The clicker is fun at first, but then gets old. I used one in chemistry and the server would always mess up. I also lost clicker points because my clicker wouldn't connect to the server. No fun there.
Graham
2 years ago
I have used this clicker device as an instructor for a class that consisted of 180 students. Some of the pros and cons of using this device when teaching a class this size:

PROs:
- I could almost instantly obtain information on which topics the students understood easily and which topics they needed more time with. In this way, I could engineer a lecture midway through. This was possible before by a show of hands, so in a sense this is a technological show of hands, i.e. allowing a quick count of the 'number of hands raised'.
- The students could get a quick look at how they measured up with respect to the other students.
- It provides student attendance/ participation information.

CONs:
- Although the concept of a 'technological show of hands' seems at first a splendid idea, often it can seem more like just another technological intrusion. That is, one has to work hard to make its use blend seamlessly into the learning process. A simple question posed to the class as a clicker question, can end up disrupting the entire learning process. For instance, when students raise their hands and say something like, 'my clicker is not working' .or the 180 students start buzzing and the noise takes time to settle down again for lecture. These things can be handled by a lecturer who asserts him/herself, but evenso, it seems like a show of hands often is the better more seamless way.
- Although the clicker can provide data on attendance and on quiz performance (possibly to include for grading), students who are performing poorly often are also the ones complaining about technical issues with the clicker. Having 180 students with a clicker, typically meant that I had about 5 to 10% of them on a given day stating among other things: that they were in class but the clicker was not working, on question 4 , they pressed B, but the clicker recorded A, they can't afford a new clicker since their first one was stolen, I did not know we had to have a clicker, 6 weeks ago they had an issue and now want to discuss what happened to their unregistered clicker reports. These are all issues that can be handled, but as a researcher and lecturer, i found that sometimes too much of my time was taken up on the many associatedf issues that cropped up with using the device.

I am not sure if i will use the device for grading or tracking attendance the next time I teach this class. I think that it has value more as a learning aid for the students and to guide my lectures mid-discussion, but it might be better to not even try and use it as a real measure of student performance given that most instructors do not have the time to be the devices 'technical service representative'.

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