Using Clickers in Your Teaching

Using Clickers in Your Teaching
Creating good questions for use in the class can be challenging and can take a lot of practice. This document is meant
as a short guide to writing questions for use with student response systems (clickers) in a classroom setting.
Why Use Student Response Systems?
The addition of clickers to a classroom can be very helpful to both students and instructors. The ability for students to
interact with the class anonymously and the chance to reflect on material, allow students to take more away from the
class than they would get from a standard lecture alone. Clickers promote active learning, increase interaction and
discussion and student reflection on the course material. By incorporating clickers as another form of engagement
with students, you are teaching to more learning styles and helping students remain engaged. When you incorporate
questioning and discussion into the class, you focus your student’s attention. The use of clickers also provides
feedback to instructors allowing them to improve on their teaching and understanding of what students are taking
away from their classes.
Clickers are used:
• To promote active learning
• To increase interactions & discussion
• To engage students
• To encourage students to be reflective about their learning
• To provide variation in instructional strategies
• To focus attention
• To provide formative feedback
What Types of Questions Should I Use?
When considering what types of questions to write, you should ask yourself what is the goal of asking this question?
What you are trying to learn from the responses? If you are trying to assess your audience’s level of previous
understanding, some simple knowledge based questions may provide you with the information you need to proceed
in your teaching. If you are trying to encourage deeper level thinking in your students on material you have just
presented, your questions should require students to process the material in some way. According to Barber and Njus
(2007), response systems are most effective when students are challenged to think about their understanding of the
subject.
Factual Questions
These questions can be used to test recall of important points from prior classes, or student understanding of key facts prior to the start of the lecture. These don’t often help a student learn but help you understand current knowledge.
Multiple-choice questions can demonstrate whether or not students understand important concepts and
principles. It works best if you ensure the question requires students to process the material in some way to arrive at the correct answer.
Often a case study can be paired with a follow-up question to encourage student engagement.
E.g., You can ask students to diagnose the patient or provide treatment options.
Conceptual Questions
Case Study
University Teaching Services
http://www.umanitoba.ca/uts
One-Best-Answer Questions
Questions which include multiple answer choices where all are plausible but the student is required to select the one best answer can be a starting point for classroom debate.
Questions which may not have correct answers can engage students and promote discussions, particularly in response to ethical, legal, or moral issues.
Students can be asked questions which require them to predict outcomes. They can also be asked to provide evidence for their predictions.
Do you need to understand the makeup of your classroom before proceeding? Use clickers to quickly gather data from your students.
Clicker questions can be designed to ask for feedback on how well a particular class or course is going or even how well the instruction is supporting their learning.
Opinion Questions
Questions Asking for Predictions
Data Gathering Questions
Feedback on Teaching
How Can This Change My Class?
Using clickers can change your class through student engagment, using feedback for learning and promoting deep
learning. One of the most important things to consider when using clickers to engage your students is that students
will learn best if they have the opportunity to receive feedback on the correct answer soon after they answer the
question. This feedback can come directly from the instructor however it can be even more powerful when the
students are provided with the opportunity to discuss the question and answer in small groups before the answer is
provided by the instructor. If you provide the students with a question that will require some thought, then ask them
to justify their answer to the people around them they will reflect on the material in even deeper ways.
Need Help?
If you would like more information on clickers in your
classroom and/or developing questions for use with
clickers please contact University Teaching Services at
[email protected]. You can also find more information
on discussion and questioning in the the resources
listing.
Resources
Barber, M., Njus, D. (2007). Clicker evolution: seeking intelligent design. CBE Life Science Education 6 (1): 1-8. Retrieved September 25, 2009 from http://www.lifescied.org/content/6/1/1.short#BIBL
University of Manitoba Teaching Handbook pages 3.38, 3.42 and 3.53 available at
http://intranet.umanitoba.ca/academic_support/uts/media/5_lr_UTShandbook.pdf
Best practices section of iclicker.com http://www.iclicker.com/community/bestpractices/
University Teaching Services
http://www.umanitoba.ca/uts