A student uses his clicker to answer a question in Professor Jeff Kenney's Astronomy 120 class, Galaxies and the Universe.
On September 4, 1998, a curious game show entered the annals of British television. It was originally called Cash Mountain but quickly changed its moniker to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? When it appeared a year later in the United States, audiences tuned in eagerly to watch contestants avail themselves of “lifelines” by phoning friends or eliminating answer choices as they battled their way to millionaire-dom. But, as former Yale student James Suroweicki notes in his bestselling The Wisdom of Crowds, the most reliable lifeline of all was asking the audience, which answered questions correctly 91% of the time.
And what made this assist from the audience possible? First used to evaluate viewers’ reactions to unreleased movies and television pilots, “audience response systems” (ARSs), as they were formally known, were introduced in the 1960s. By the late 1990s, ARSs started to filter into university classrooms.
Professor Jeff Kenney encourages student participation in one of his Galaxies and the Universe lectures.
With help from the ITS Instructional Technology Group, Yale University adopted its first ARS. But while the basic technology used in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? is largely the same as that in Yale classrooms, the quality of the answers are not-which is exactly how the instructors at Yale want it.
“The ineffectiveness of the traditional lecture course is pretty well known,” notes Jeffrey Kenney, professor and chairman of Yale’s Astronomy Department, who sought greater engagement from his Astronomy 120 students. That is when he decided to consider an ARS or-as it is more commonly called-”clicker technology,” which placed in his students’ hands a remote transmitter device that could transmit real-time answers to questions he presented to the class. By way of example, consider this poser:
Assuming life on Earth continues for that long, how will we die when the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy finally come together?
1) We’ll all be sucked into a black hole created by their collision
2) We’ll perish as the result of an “Active Galactic Nucleus” (AGN) Blast
3) We’ll die of boredom
4) We’ll be extinguished by direct collision with another star
Despite the allure of death by pyrotechnics, Professor Kenney assures us that boredom will be our fate because the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy are largely empty space. But the answers from his students tell an entirely different story-not so much about galaxies as what they know about them.
Unlike audience responses in Millionaire, answers to this question range all over the place, which is perfect, according to Kenney, for moving his class into a broader discussion of the ideas that lie behind the question. “For this technology, factual or quantitative questions that depend on rote memorization or basic mathematical applications,” Kenney points out, “are generally weaker than questions that focus on problem solving at a conceptual level.” Not getting the question right-as demonstrated by the random distribution of answers to this brainteaser-is far more valuable to the process than everyone knowing the answer.
Stephen Irons teaching Physics 180. A student helps demonstrate the effects of a Van de Graff generator while a clicker question results slide can be seen on the projection screen.
Stephen Irons, Lecturer in Yale’s Department of Physics, is also an advocate of clicker technology in the classroom, having used it in Physics 180 courses since fall 2007. Because the Physics Department was a relatively early adopter of the technology at Yale, Irons’ use of it, like Kenney’s, comes with pedagogical variants that enhance the quality of the classroom experience.
Like many introductory science classes, Physics 180 enrolls approximately 100 students per class, obligating faculty to make use of the traditional lecture hall. Classes this size make it nearly impossible to deepen discussion of a topic the way seminar-style courses do. Instead, faculty often find themselves confronting a sea of anonymous faces with no way of determining students’ commitment to their time in class. Clicker technology defuses this all-too-protective anonymity by instantly recording who has been paying attention and who is asleep at the wheel.
“We’ve thought carefully about the most effective use of this technology,” Irons notes, adding that there is no value in using the technology as just a new way of assigning pop quizzes. True, the technology is ideal for recording the attendance and participation of students, for which they are graded. But since the goal is to uncover what students don’t know, penalizing them for incorrect answers would send exactly the wrong message (and encourage students not to answer). As Irons points out, the best discussions occur when more than 50% fail to answer the question correctly. And since the entire class’s answer is not only recorded but is instantly graphed and displayed on the lecture hall’s viewing screen, students are immediate witnesses to the strength or weakness of their collective performance.
But Irons and other faculty also take the technology one step further. While students aren’t graded for their answers as individuals to questions posed to the entire class, they are assessed for the quality of their answers in the group work that follows. “It would be easy to ask the students a question, gather their answers, and, assuming the majority missed it, walk them through to a correct response,” Irons points out. “But we thought ‘Why not use the technology to facilitate the group work, too?’”
One of the ways lecture hall classes get students to interact is by breaking them up into small groups and then having them report on their results. Irons and other Physics department faculty decided to use clicker technology to aid in this process. This is done through a before-and-after question method, popularized by Eric Mazur in his book Peer Instruction, where a question asked of the class on which they perform poorly as individuals is asked again. But this time, with no solution yet given by the instructor, they must work as a group to answer it correctly. It is at this point that Surowiecki’s “wisdom-of-the-crowds” effect kicks in, with students more often than not winning through to a correct answer through the collaborative give-and-take of group discussion. Of course, that interest in finding the right answer is prompted by more than just natural curiosity or group dynamics. The fact that each student will be graded for the rightness of the group’s answer as a whole, publicly delivered by clicker technology, prods them to work as a team. “Through clicker technology,” Irons emphasizes, ” the act of voting invests the student in more than just getting the right answer but in understanding why it’s right.” For that reason alone, what more can a teacher ask?
