![]() ![]() college faculty members are familiar with clickers and 12% of faculty members have adopted clickers in their own classrooms ( FTI Consulting, 2015). ![]() A recent nationwide survey found that 86% of U.S. One such instructional approach involves instructors posing multiple-choice conceptual questions, fostering peer discussion about these questions among the students, and asking students to indicate their answers via personal response systems or clickers.Ĭlickers are electronic voting devices that allow instructors to obtain real-time student responses to multiple-choice questions in order to assess student thinking and to inform instruction (e.g., Mazur, 1997 Caldwell, 2007 Smith et al., 2011). Moreover, a recent comprehensive meta-analysis of 225 science education research articles indicates that students learn more in and are less likely to drop out of STEM courses that use these active-engagement instructional approaches ( Freeman et al., 2014). These findings provide new insights into the range of clicker implementation at a campus-wide level and how such findings can be used to inform targeted professional development for faculty.Ī number of national reports informed by emerging education research have advocated for active-engagement instruction in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses ( American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2010 President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012 Singer et al., 2012). Because instructors can vary their instructional style from one clicker question to the next, we also explored differences in how individual instructors incorporated peer discussion during clicker questions. Investigation of these modes revealed differences in the range of behaviors, the amount of time instructors lecture, and how challenging the clicker questions were to answer. ![]() One possible explanation stems from the observation of three distinct modes of clicker use: peer discussion, in which students had the opportunity to talk with one another during clicker questions individual thinking, in which no peer discussion was observed and alternative collaboration, in which students had time for discussion, but it was not paired with clicker questions. Comparisons of classes taught with ( n = 80) and without ( n = 184) clickers show that, while instructional behaviors differ, the use of clickers alone does not significantly impact the time instructors spend lecturing. At the University of Maine, middle and high school teachers observed more than 250 university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classes and collected information on the nature of instruction, including how clickers were being used. ![]()
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