Clickers: Audience Response Systems

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00:00:16.06 The first thing I learned using clickers
00:00:17.17 was that my instruction was nowhere near as effective
00:00:20.05 as I thought it was.
00:00:22.00 A typical situation in my experience,
00:00:25.19 in a lecture class,
00:00:27.13 is that you have explained something
00:00:30.08 and then you ask a question to the class about it,
00:00:32.22 and three or four people raise their hand.
00:00:35.05 And you call... usually people who are pretty knowledgeable.
00:00:38.16 And you call on somebody,
00:00:40.13 and they give the right answer,
00:00:41.27 and then you say, well, did everybody hear what Sarah said?
00:00:45.00 And do you understand why she said it?
00:00:48.07 And so on.
00:00:49.24 And then... people just sit there.
00:00:52.01 And then you say, alright, let's move on.
00:00:53.28 And you assume that the students
00:00:56.26 have understood what you said.
00:00:58.20 But in fact, you've only sampled a tiny fraction of the audience.
00:01:02.15 And the clickers allow you to sample the whole class,
00:01:04.27 and find out immediately, for example,
00:01:07.17 that half the people didn't get it,
00:01:11.02 which you never will... would know otherwise.
00:01:15.03 So, what our clickers?
00:01:16.17 Well, the technical term is an audience response device.
00:01:20.17 And it's a little handheld device like a TV remote.
00:01:24.19 And generally, they have five buttons on them
00:01:27.03 -- A, B, C, and D --
00:01:28.13 so that the instructor can put up a multiple-choice question
00:01:31.26 on the screen in front of the class,
00:01:34.17 and then everybody can click their answer.
00:01:37.21 And the data goes right to the instructor's computer,
00:01:40.02 and the instructor can then show a histogram
00:01:42.23 -- if he or she desires --
00:01:45.01 showing which of... how many people answered A,
00:01:47.25 how many answered B, and so on.
00:01:49.27 So, it's a way to get a response from the entire class
00:01:54.09 rather than simply people who are willing to raise their hand
00:01:57.19 in response to a question.
00:01:59.10 I'll never forget the first time
00:02:02.03 I posed an experimental clicker question
00:02:05.14 after explaining something...
00:02:07.21 what I... in what I thought was a completely crystal clear manner,
00:02:10.27 and half the students obviously hadn't understood it.
00:02:14.16 And I was shocked, because in the past,
00:02:17.01 I had always called on people,
00:02:19.03 and a few of them got it,
00:02:20.25 and then I was moving on.
00:02:23.00 So, I... it was a humbling experience.
00:02:26.17 And I learned not to trust my evaluation
00:02:30.23 of how clear I was being or how well I was getting an idea across to the students.
00:02:36.24 There are other ways to poll a class, obviously.
00:02:39.14 You can ask people to raise their hands -- how many like A?, and so on.
00:02:43.18 You can use colored cards,
00:02:46.18 where A is red and B is green and so forth,
00:02:48.22 and people hold up a card depending... for their answer.
00:02:52.23 But in all those cases,
00:02:55.05 you're revealing what your choice is,
00:02:57.05 and many students seem to be nervous about that.
00:02:59.26 And the clickers are nice because,
00:03:02.10 first of all, there... it's absolutely anonymous.
00:03:04.19 You could ask them an embarrassing question.
00:03:06.18 You could say, so far, I have found this lecture
00:03:09.08 fascinating, a waste of time, boring, and so on.
00:03:13.16 And students probably wouldn't give you an honest answer if they had to raise their hands.
00:03:17.14 But on the clickers, you'll get the true... the true stuff.
00:03:22.23 And second, the data is all...
00:03:25.06 the data are all recorded in the computer,
00:03:27.10 so that if one wants to go back
00:03:30.05 and look at how people did on a question,
00:03:32.02 and what kind of distribution of answers there were,
00:03:34.27 or do biol... education research on the results,
00:03:38.05 it's easy to do.
00:03:39.20 The clickers are registered,
00:03:42.12 and so the instructor has the clicker number,
00:03:44.26 so you can go back and follow an individual student's responses
00:03:47.16 if you want to, using their clicker information.
00:03:53.17 I think the most important thing, probably,
00:03:57.07 with clickers is the kinds of questions you ask.
00:04:01.26 I know several colleagues who say,
00:04:04.21 well, I tried clickers, and they didn't work very well.
00:04:07.15 I didn't think the students were learning anything,
00:04:09.29 and they didn't like them,
00:04:11.24 and so I stopped.
00:04:13.25 And almost always, the problem is that they were not asking
00:04:17.08 interesting, challenging questions that required students
00:04:20.25 to really think about the answer.
00:04:23.03 Some people use them simply to take attendance
00:04:26.21 -- it's a convenient way to know who's in class --
00:04:30.18 or simply ask factual recall questions,
00:04:33.15 which don't really benefit anybody.
00:04:36.08 The students presumably just wrote down what you told them,
00:04:39.13 and now you ask them to spit it back with a clicker question,
00:04:42.21 and they can do that.
00:04:45.00 But the students prefer...
00:04:47.24 much prefer to have questions that really challenge them,
00:04:49.19 in our experience.
00:04:51.02 Let your brain think.
00:04:52.13 You know stuff about this.
00:04:53.29 How do plants use the oxygen gas...
00:04:56.01 okay, oxygen gas that they release
00:04:58.20 as a waste product of photosynthesis... photosynthesis?
00:05:01.05 Do they, A, use it to build more sugar
00:05:03.19 and glucose in chloroplasts?
00:05:05.18 Do they, B... is it a direct source of energy for plants?
00:05:09.13 C, is oxygen primarily released for animals to use in cellular respiration?
00:05:15.01 D, is oxygen required for ATP production in the mitochondria of plants?
00:05:20.01 And E, oxygen isn't used for anything by plants.
00:05:23.08 So, think for just 15 seconds.
00:05:25.09 I'm gonna time it.
00:05:27.09 Benjamin Bloom showed, many years ago,
00:05:29.23 that the... probably the most effective instruction
00:05:33.12 is one-on-one tutoring.
00:05:35.19 And when it was... people studied,
00:05:38.17 well, what do really effective tutors do?
00:05:41.13 What they do is they ask questions.
00:05:44.02 They don't tell students the answers.
00:05:46.18 And they lead students from one thing to the next
00:05:49.01 by asking challenging questions
00:05:51.15 that are just challenging enough so the students
00:05:54.00 can get it with some effort,
00:05:56.03 but not so difficult that they discourage the students.
00:06:00.25 And so, it's interesting to think about
00:06:03.28 how you can do that in a large class.
00:06:05.22 And the clickers really allow you to do that,
00:06:07.24 because you can ask a series of questions
00:06:11.21 of increasing difficulty,
00:06:14.00 and lead the students from one step to the next
00:06:17.02 so that the students are getting this kind of interaction.
00:06:21.01 And you're not telling them the answer;
00:06:22.23 you're letting them arrive at it by a process of constructivist...
00:06:27.24 putting things together in their own minds.
00:06:30.06 So, I want to do a clicker question.
00:06:32.02 This is one of the first clicker questions that I asked you
00:06:34.15 when we started this "transformations of energy and matter" unit,
00:06:37.17 which is that little green symbol on the left of every slide.
00:06:39.27 What's the original source of all the energy in your body right now?
00:06:42.26 Because we're about to move from talking about mass
00:06:44.29 to talking about energy.
00:06:46.05 So, click.
00:06:48.15 Clickety click.
00:06:51.08 Still, keep going, keep going.
00:06:54.05 Alright, I'm gonna stop there.
00:06:55.29 I wanna see what it looks like.
00:06:59.26 Alright.
00:07:02.25 Well, you've listened to me about nutrients.
00:07:06.10 [Laughing]
00:07:07.17 If you can ask a question that's difficult enough so that half the class,
00:07:09.28 for example, doesn't get it,
00:07:11.28 you could explain it again, right?
00:07:14.09 You could just tell them the answer and move on.
00:07:20.08 But what we found, and others have found,
00:07:22.09 is that by far the most effective thing to do
00:07:24.15 is to ask the students to discuss it
00:07:26.24 and debate it among themselves.
00:07:29.04 To say, I taught this to you...
00:07:31.15 I explained this as clearly as I could,
00:07:34.02 and half of you apparently didn't get it,
00:07:36.23 so talk to your neighbor and see if you can convince
00:07:40.14 him or her that you're right, and he or she is wrong.
00:07:43.27 And just have a little debate about it,
00:07:45.28 and then we'll revote.
00:07:48.01 And almost inevitably, when you do that,
00:07:50.08 the percentage of correct answers goes way up.
00:07:55.03 Here's a question that we posed to the class,
00:07:59.13 and we asked them to think about it briefly
00:08:01.27 and then cast a vote using their clickers.
00:08:06.14 And here are the results following the discussion,
00:08:09.28 after students have had a chance to debate with each other
00:08:12.20 and think about it... about it together.
00:08:15.13 And in this case, the correct answer is C.
00:08:19.25 And you can see that very few people
00:08:21.22 got that the first time around,
00:08:23.22 but then, after the discussion,
00:08:25.11 a majority of the students got the correct answer.
00:08:28.19 And they arrived at it by this process
00:08:31.08 of debating with each other and talking about it.
00:08:35.28 I'm gonna ask you to turn and talk to your neighbor.
00:08:38.15 And I'm gonna ask you to think about this question
00:08:40.14 in a different way,
00:08:42.09 and I'm gonna ask it again.
00:08:43.20 And it may not get us anywhere, in which case we need to keep working on it.
00:08:46.11 If this question said,
00:08:48.15 where is the original source of all the mass
00:08:51.26 that's in your body right now...
00:08:53.18 remember, I asked you two versions of this question...
00:08:56.02 and it's the same choices...
00:08:58.12 if I asked you the mass version
00:09:00.10 -- where does the mass of your body...
00:09:02.13 where does the mass of a plant come from? --
00:09:06.26 then how would you answer that question?
00:09:09.20 And then are you answering that question,
00:09:11.08 and not really reading energy,
00:09:12.25 which is in capital letters and in red?
00:09:15.28 Okay, turn and talk to your neighbor.
00:09:17.23 How would you answer this differently if it was mass?
00:09:19.23 And is that confusing you?
00:09:21.13 And then I'm gonna ask you to click it again.
00:09:26.24 During the student discussion,
00:09:28.24 it's I think useful for the instructor
00:09:31.12 to listen in on what's being discussed.
00:09:33.27 You know, are they talking about the football game yesterday?
00:09:36.07 Or are they actually talking about the question, for one thing?
00:09:40.26 So, the instructor can circulate.
00:09:44.04 If you have teaching assistants in the course,
00:09:46.16 or undergraduate learning assistants,
00:09:49.28 then that's a good time for them to interact with groups
00:09:53.19 that are working on the problem.
00:09:55.20 You have to train them not to give the right answer
00:09:59.07 but simply to try to encourage students
00:10:01.27 and prompt them towards the right answer.
00:10:04.05 Click it one more time, one more time,
00:10:05.20 click it one more time.
00:10:07.04 I don't know if anybody gets it.
00:10:08.15 Click it one more time.
00:10:10.15 We're about to start talking about energy,
00:10:12.23 and energy is a very hard idea to get your head around,
00:10:16.00 so that's why I'm asking this question again.
00:10:18.07 Clickety click, click, click, click.
00:10:25.03 Alright... okay... I'm gonna stop.
00:10:29.23 Showing the results... oh, what do you think?
00:10:34.10 Ohhghh... hahaha.
00:10:37.02 Alright.
00:10:39.20 Even when peer discussion doesn't seem to be working,
00:10:43.15 because students don't arrive at the right answer,
00:10:46.04 it's still a very valuable piece of information for the instructor.
00:10:49.15 It shows again that...
00:10:52.05 how valuable the clickers are to provide the feedback
00:10:54.16 that lets the instructor intervene in a productive way
00:10:57.22 and get the students to the correct understanding.
00:11:02.01 So, I would argue that the ultimate source of energy in your body is sunlight.
00:11:08.04 Okay?
00:11:09.20 The energy is what the plants...
00:11:12.11 The students have been primed by the discussion,
00:11:14.12 so that even if they're...
00:11:18.09 so that they're receptive to really understanding
00:11:22.13 the answer that you give or the explanation that you give at the end of the process.
00:11:26.11 Okay, you've done that in many classes.
00:11:28.09 It's capturing that sunlight energy in the light reactions,
00:11:32.08 okay?,
00:11:33.20 then temporarily storing it in those little energy carriers:
00:11:36.08 ADP... ATP and NADPH...
00:11:38.25 So, in this case,
00:11:41.09 what Kimberly has done is take this information
00:11:44.04 and provide a clear explanation
00:11:46.18 that helps the students toward the correct understanding.
00:11:49.23 One of my colleagues came up with my favorite three-word description of good teaching.
00:11:54.13 She just says, "Ask, don't tell."
00:11:58.29 And there's a lot of wisdom in that little statement.
00:12:03.04 And it drives students crazy sometimes.
00:12:05.08 They say, "Well, just give us the answer."
00:12:07.05 You know, "What is the right answer?"
00:12:11.01 And... but they will learn much more if you ask them
00:12:14.10 to come up with the right answer, one way or another.

This Talk

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Educators

Recorded: July 2014

Talk Overview

Clickers are Audience Response Systems that enable instructors to ask a multiple-choice question, poll students for an answer, and display the aggregated results to the class. In this video showing examples of active learning classroom models, Bill Wood (University of Colorado Boulder) describes how clickers can be used effectively to engage students.

Educators featured in this video: Laura Burrus, San Francisco State University; Janet Casagrand, University of Colorado, Boulder; Kimberly Tanner, San Francisco State University; Bill Wood, University of Colorado, Boulder.

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