Faculty Focus: What's Happening at USA?

Increasing faculty awareness and use of the Clicker is one of PETAL’s chief priorities in the area of instructional technology. Nicole Carr, a 2007 Teaching Excellence Award winner, recently shared her thoughts on the Clicker with PETAL after using it for the first half of this semester.

“Even though I think I do a reasonable job as a teacher, I like to find new ways to involve students in class,” she explains. However, she finds the large sections of the introductory courses especially challenging.  “I dislike the strict “lecturer” position. Don’t misunderstand, I love talking about sociology. I just don’t like to talk to a room full of passive students.”

One of her strategies for making the students more active in their learning is to use the clicker to break up her monologue and introduce on-the-spot learning and immediate feedback.

Prior to using clickers, Dr. Carr would ask the class questions and get answers, “usually from the same few folks unless I called on new faces.” However, by incorporating clickers into her class presentations, she can include questions in the presentations themselves.  Her students read the question on the slide and then click in their response. They have a set time to respond and then the class answers are displayed in a chart on the question slide.

“Instantly I know what percentage of students knew the right answers and the wrong ones!” she says, and adds that this gives us, as a class, a great opportunity to talk about why a response was the wrong answer.

“My initial intention was just to provide a class break at periods when attention begins to wander and bring the students back to the course. After a couple classes, though, I really began to appreciate the instant feedback and the teaching opportunities it offers.”

Students also seem to appreciate the clickers. She asks for feedback after each class meeting and one person wrote “clickers are cool” and another added “do more clicker questions.” Many students have stopped by on their way out of class to say that they like the clickers.

Their clicker questions are not graded (so she doesn’t have to worry about cheating) and students appear to be engaged in learning and less focused on grading. As a result of their requests, she plans to use clickers for a mini test review before the next exam.

“Students will be relaxed and have the chance to answer questions like those that would appear on the test,” she expects,  “and I get a preview of how well prepared they are for the exam. Who knows, it may be a bust, but given our experiences in class so far, I think it will be a very useful way to help them prepare for our test.”

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