Race, Class, Gender

I’ve still a bulleted list of “bloggables” running through my head and staring at me from my notebook from last week’s day-long journey through the ELI (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative) Annual Meeting.  This semester, I’ve adopted the clicker technology for use in my classroom.  Although every meeting has been punctuated by snafus <whether based on technological issues or personal ineptitude with an unfamiliar system, I cannot say…>, I remain optimistic that the wrinkles will be ironed out soon enough and these little student remotes will prove a boon to classroom interaction and engagement.  I mention this in this particular post because, having adopted clickers for the semester, I’m keen to learn more about their potential uses/how other instructors have used them successfully.  Accordingly, I was drawn to two ELI sessions dealing with clickers.

In selecting the first, I must have missed the session descriptor following the semi-colon because the content was geared toward librarians charged with “one shot library instruction,” rather than standard instructors.  Driving question: Can clickers be used to improve the teaching of research skills to a group of students that must be delivered in a single class session?  Can it improve retention and engagement?  The group of presenters spoke on their current research project, which addresses these questions.  Results are inconclusive because they are only midway through data collection.  The researchers’ guiding expectation, however, is that clickers would be a useful classroom tool in the context one-shot library instruction (i.e. a setting in which there is no prior knowledge of the student and her background knowledge or gaps therein with respect to library use and study skills) because they will address the 4 factors of John Keller’s motivational design.  According to Keller, 4 elements must be present for students to learn: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction.  The explanation of each of these is relatively intuitive, but being unfamiliar with Keller’s model, the ARCS model provided a new way for me to think about clickers in my own instruction.  Intuitively, I had been driven toward the use of clickers for these very reasons: presumably they will provide a mechanism through which students are more engaged (e.g. doing classroom opinion polls, surveys, or quizzes throughout the course of the period); they will make the material more relevant (e.g., again through polling and surveys that allow students to compare themselves with one another and national averages); they will provide a barometer of understanding for both parties; and, hopefully, having the instant gratification of seeing correct responses or other material displayed following a quiz or discussion would provided some measure of satisfaction for the student.

The second clicker session that I attended at ELI was “CATs with Clickers.”  CATs = Classroom Assessment Techniques, a term/acronym borrowed from the the Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by Angelo and Cross.  Per the presenters, the purpose of the session was to introduce CATs  and discuss clickers as a way to implement them, particularly as a tool in larger classrooms.  From the outset, they asserted that theirs was not a blind endorsement of clickers (or any technology for that matter) in the classroom, but rather that  instructional needs and good pedagogy should drive technological use.  Not just technology for technology’s sake <in fact and happily, this was a relatively oft-repeated refrain at the ELI conference>.

What are CATs?  They are a quick, easy way to get immediate feedback about:

• Students’ prior knowledge,
• Preconceptions and/or misconceptions regarding material,
• Opinions,
• Understanding/confusion,
• Satisfaction

Examples of CATs include the one-minute paper, the “muddiest point,” and the one sentence summary.  A CAT starts with a teaching question:

• Do I need to review basic concepts?
• Did students grasp the main points presented?

With the response to the teaching question at hand, the agile teacher can make decisions about the presentation of material on the fly, adapting the class accordingly.  The presenters referred to this advantage as one regarding formative assessement, where the instructor can use the feedback to form, for example, the content of the class for that meeting.  Additional reasons for the use of CATs include the ability to monitor what stents are thinking or understanding and providing near-immediate feedback to instructor and student alike.  The presenters went on to demonstrate how CATs are best augmented with clickers particularly with reference to the Angelo and Cross (1993) book mentioned above.  In an interactive example, one of the presenters (A German Lit. Prof.), posed a multiple choice question to the audience, a group with no expected background knowledge on the subject matter.  She then showed the results of the question in a bar graph and, in Who-Wants-To-Be-A-Millionaire fashion, indicated that the correct response was in fact one of the two columns which had gotten the most votes.  We were then instructed to discuss with our neighbors why we would choose one response over the other and, a few minutes later, vote again.  I thought this was a good demonstration of a clicker version of a think-pair-share exercise which would help students clarify their reasoning, thought process, or simply retention of material.

The presenters recommended, as additional resources resources for learning and thinking about clickers in the classroom: Eric Mazur and Derek Bruff.

ELI – III, a final installment forthcoming.  Stay tuned.