Student Response Systems
Definition
Student response systems (SRSs)—also known as personal response systems (PRSs) or clickers—are wireless devices used for interactive polling in face-to-face classes, particularly in large lecture courses. With student response systems instructors can quickly gather information about their students’ understanding (or lack thereof) of course content. Students can answer muliple-choice questions posed by the instructor (and often posted on a PowerPoint slide) using response pads the size of a TV remote. Instructors also can use the system to provide students with immediate feedback and to aggregate and display responses to the entire class in a graphical form.
Educational Uses
Student response systems promote active learning, student engagement, and collaboration in the physical classroom. Instructors can pose questions, and students answer them, by pressing a button on the response pad. Some instructors encourage students to develop a response in pairs or groups. The instructor can then display a visual representation of student responses. Some systems also enable the instructor to ask a question a second time, maybe after further group discussion or lecturing, and compare the answers to see how students responded differently to the question after further deliberation or instruction.
Specifically, SRSs can be used to
- conduct interactive polls in the classroom,
- deliver in-class quizzes,
- integrate polling into think-pair-share activities,
- obtain student feedback about lectures and other learning activities,
- facilitate class discussions, and
- gather student demographic data.
Issues
Instructors should be aware of some issues when they use this type of technology for teaching and learning.
Instructional
- The cost of response pads (clickers) is becoming more reasonable, but using student response systems could require an added cost for students.
- Crafting good questions and learning activities is the key to using student response systems in a way that is useful for students and instructors.
- When you introduce any new technology into the classroom, it is easier to start small the first semester and refine your approach for future semesters based on your experience and student feedback.
Accessibility
- Response pads with many buttons on them are typically small and could cause difficulty for persons with mobility impairments.
- Colored lights on the response pad could provide issues for persons with visual impairments.
Technical
- Batteries can and do run out. It might be useful to bring extra batteries to class.
- Response pads can break easily if dropped. It might be useful to have a few extra available for students.
- The complexity of the software packages used with student response systems varies greatly; some emphasize ease-of-use and others offer more features. Be sure to give yourself time to get familiar with each one you use. Contact your local technical support staff for assistance.
Examples
See the following for examples of how others are using this type of technology to enhance learning.
Students Talk Back in the Lecture Hall
This article discusses how Donald Lui, a professor of applied economics, uses student response systems to achieve more student participation in his classes.
Resources
The following sources may help you use and teach with this type of technology.
Classroom Response Systems "Clickers" (Vanderbilt)
Derek Bruff, assistant director for the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, writes and maintains this resource site. While there is much good practical advice on how to use SRSs, what kinds of questions to pose when using them, and what types of activities smart implementation of SRSs can enable, the site is most valuable for its up-to-date bibliography. You can also follow Derek Bruff’s blog which centers on teaching with classroom response systems.
Clickers
TurningPoint is the standardized student response system supported at The Ohio State University. This site includes information about how to set up the necessary devices and software and links to other resources. Of particular use is the information under the "In Practice" tab, which includes ideas about how to use clickers in specific disciplines, classroom implementation tips, and question design suggestions.
Mazur Group: Education
Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard University, devotes part of his time to education research and finding ways to improve science education. He has used student response systems in his courses. The Mazur Group Web site includes resources for instructors interested in using student response systems to more actively engage students.
Student Response Systems (SRS): The UW-System Clicker Project
Four campuses in the University of Wisconsin system received funding to assess uses of student response systems. This Web site was created to support and publicize the project, and includes information about best practices, examples of uses, guides and manuals, and research articles.
7 Things You Should Know About... Clickers (PDF)
ELI (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative) publishes a “7 Things You Should Know About…” series of brief overviews of emerging technologies and their educational uses. This one includes information about what SRSs are, who is using them, why this is significant, and the implications for teaching and learning.
Research
The following research literature has been published about the educational uses of this type of technology.
Caldwell, J.E. (2007). Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips. Life Sciences Education, 6(1), 9-20.
This essay surveys the current literature on audience response systems. She finds evidence to support that intelligent uses of SRSs show improved attendance rates, reduced attrition, and sometimes increased performance on grades. Collating advice from the literature, Caldwell has assembled an extremely useful list of best practices and an entire section on what constitutes an effective question that can be answered with this method.
Len, P. M. (2007). Different reward structures to motivate student interaction with electronic response systems in astronomy. Astronomy Education Review, 5(2), 5-15.The author used SRSs to compare two grading reward systems. One group received a standard number of points for answering review questions correctly in class; the second group received a double score if the entire class met a threshold of 80% correct answers. This latter reward structure strongly encouraged students to cooperate and teach each other. Len reported higher success rates for all students when this cooperative method was employed.
Liu, Donald J., Walker, J.D., Bauer, Theresa A., and Zhao, Meng. “Learning in the Pit: Experiments in Economics and Teaching.” Transform 2.2 (2007): 1, 5, 8.These University of Minnesota authors examine the use of an SRS in an introductory Economics class. Using the instant feedback feature of the SRS, the instructord created a commodities trading simulation in which students buy and sell products and thereby create a dataset that they later analyze to prove classic economic theory. Their findings pointed to non-significant but encouraging findings on several performance measures, and they are refining and continuing their research.
Bruff, D. (2009). Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.Derek Bruff is the Assistant Director of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching, and he has maintained an important resource site and blog on SRSs. This monograph will be the first dedicated to the implementation of SRSs.
Crouch, C. H., and Eric Mazur. “Peer Instruction: Ten Years of Experience and Results.” American Journal of Physics 69 (2001): 970–977.
This compelling paper reports on data from 10 years of teaching with “peer instruction,” a collaborative learning technique that centers around ConcepTests, conceptual questions that are designed to expose common difficulties in understanding concepts that inform course material. Teaching strategies include pre-class preparation, in-class conceptual probes, student response, peer-to-peer discussion, revised responses, and feedback. Peer instruction is amenable to implementation via student response systems. Research results show substantial, statistically significant learning gains as a result of the use of peer instruction.
Draper, S. W., and M. I. Brown. “Increased Interactivity in Lectures Using an Electronic Voting System.” Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20 (2004): 81–94.
Draper, S. W., J. Cargill, and Q. Cutts. “Electronically Enhanced Classroom Interaction.” Australian Journal Of Educational Technology 18, no.1 (2002): 13–23.
Both articles provide a theoretical rationale for using student response systems in the classroom and describe a number of different techniques for using them. The first article also presents the results of evaluation efforts over two years and includes a number of possible survey questions to be used in the evaluation of student response systems.
Dufresne, Robert J., William J. Gerace, William J. Leonard, Jose P. Mestre, and Laura Wenk. “Classtalk: A Classroom Communication System for Active Learning.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education 7, no. 2 (1996): 3–47. http://www.bedu.com/Publications/UMASS.pdf.
This informative paper describes how a student response system was used in moderately large physics courses over two years. The theoretical motivation for using student response systems in science learning is described thoroughly. The authors sought a more active form of engagement in their classes to overcome student preconceptions and misconceptions; help students create the principle- and concept-based knowledge structures that characterize experts; and motivate their students. Their student response sequence begins with question presentation and then moves to cooperative group work, answer collection, and finally, class-wide discussion.
The article is most valuable for its detailed description of the authors’ questioning procedure. They focused on conceptual, rather than computational, questions that often were posed before a relevant presentation or demonstration. Moreover, they organized questions to build on each other and on previously learned material. They spent substantial time on the group work and whole-class discussion. As a result the instructors reduced the time spent presenting material to about a third of the class period. This approach is different from that developed by Mazur’s group.
