Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Room 208, 2:15 to 3:00 pm
David Test, IT Specialist and Christine Masters, Assistant Professor
University Park

Dave interviewed Christine about her math and physics-based engineering class. Because it is a large class, she needed a way to find out the students’ understanding and misconceptions about the material. In creating multiple choice questions, she tries to create alternative answers that represent core misrepresentations about concepts so that she can then address and correct. She incorporates one or two clicker activities in each lesson.

Clicker responses can be used by instructor for grading and monitoring attendance although these are not primary reasons for using. The percentage of points that she includes for grading that relies on clickers is fairly small, just enough to encourage students to attend class and to participate with the clickers. Dave says that students tend to dislike the use of clickers more when they are used only to take attendance. Best practice is to incorporate their use meaningfully into the course content.

Comment from someone in the audience was that her students said that the use of clickers helped to keep their minds from wondering during class.

Dave noted that, although clickers have been on campus for 6 or 7 years, they have only recently standardized. He believes this is now a good time to adopt this technology and that the adoption rate will begin to climb. Technological glitches have been ironed out pretty nicely by now. Christine encouraged people to try it out if they were thinking of it because she believes that it is a very reliable and easy-to-use technology. But, she says you should think carefully about how you want to use it to make sure it is integrated into your course content.

Someone in the audience asked if it is possible to use clickers to ask open ended questions. Although Christine doesn’t use it that way, she has heard of other instructors using it this way by creating a question, asking the class for their ideas on what could be several possible answers, then using the clickers to poll the class.

Some facts on clicker use at Penn State:

Interwrite PRS RF has been chosen as the standard student response system (clicker) for Penn State UP. Can process up to 3000 responses per second. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. Some online info about clickers at Penn State:

Interwrite PRS RF site at Penn State:
http://clc.its.psu.edu/classrooms/prs

Dave Test’s blog about clickers at Penn State:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/dmt155/blogs/clickers/

Contact info for email questions/comments about clickers at Penn State:
clickers@psu.edu