A Student Response System (SRS) (e.g. clickers) is any system that enables an instructor to

a. Ask all students a question simultaneously,

b. Enable them to respond instantly and (more or less) anonymously, and

c. Display patterns of student response back to the students.

When used in classrooms, student response systems have many other names, including classroom response systems and classroom polling systems. When used online, an SRS might be called a survey, poll, or online quiz. The 'technology' itself can be as simple as a show of hands (everyone can see everyone as they vote) or colored cards (hard for students to see the votes of other students without turning around) or with electronic technologies such as specialized handheld consoles (usually called "clickers") or more general purpose hardware such as a PDA or cell phone. An example of cell phone use for student (or other audience) response: the "Poll Everywhere System."

The common denominator of all student response systems:  faculty can use an SRS quickly to discern patterns in what students think about a topic, simultaneously, even in a class of hundreds of students. Among the capabilities that vary from one type of SRS to another:

• Can students respond in text? numbers? or just by answering multiple choice questions (A, B, C, etc.)?

• Can students "click" at any time to indicate that they don't understand what's going on? or can they only respond when the faculty member asks a question?

• How anonymous are responses?  Can student responses be identified by individual  (e.g., for grading? display? to aid calling on people by name?)

• Can student responses be automatically fed into grading systems, so students get credit for responding, and for right answers?

• How do students acquire the response devices? is it institutional or class policy requiring that they have what they need to respond before starting the class (e.g., buying clickers at a bookstore; requirement to either buy a computer or use one that's publicly available on campus)?  Or are devices handed out as students arrive for a meeting, for use only at that time?

Those are some of the differences in technology. The more dramatic differences, however, are in the activities for which those hardware devices are used.

Evaluation results thus far have shown the largest gains when faculty pose conceptually challenging questions, use teh SRS to capture and display pattern of initial responses (how many people chose A, B, C...), and s, and ask students to talk in pairs before they respond, again as individuals, for a second time. Eric Mazur, a Harvard physicist, was a pioneer of this approach. It is being used in many fields, even in arenas where there is no single right answer toward which students are intended to converge. For example, clickers have been used in a problem-based learning approach to history that's also intended to foster information literacy; between votes students do research online.. This strategy for using clickers can take 15 or more minutes per question, so it is usually done only once or twice per class session. If you or your colleagues are using an SRS in this way, and want to use student feedback about the activity in order to improve the process, take a look at our Flashlight workshop materials and survey templates for getting more out of clickers.

Other activities for which clickers are used include:

• asking frequent questions that can be answered with accurate recall (usually with no conversation); this use may occur every few minutes during a class. It's intended to assure that students are doing the reading and paying attention, while providing faculty with guidance about pacing and direction.

• Administering paperless quizzes, and

• Taking attendance.

Many institutions have staff who are experimenting with student response systems. A few (e.g., Purdue) have seen enough interest from faculty to standardize on one console, equipping a large number of classrooms to support that particular system.  The first time students a required to use a clicker in class, they buy them in the bookstore. Thereafter they can use the same consoles in any class that requires them.

Selected Bibliography

This is an early stage toward assembling an annotated bibliography with a relatively small number of highly useful sources. Please send us your thoughts about annotations, what items to add, and (equally important) which items to delete from this list.

-Steve Ehrmann

Introducing and describing uses of personal response systems; institutional analyses of whether and how to support them

• Blog of resources, research reviews, and ideas for classroom management systems, from Derek Bruff at Vanderbilt.  Browse past entries. This young blog is already has an extensive set of links and ideas.

• Examples of clicker use in several disciplines at the University of Texas.  Dee Silverthorn, a biologist, illustrates she uses clickers to support an interactive approach to teaching in a series of short QuickTime eClips. Notice how she uses them to assure that students do their reading before coming class, for example.

• Ian Beatty, "Transforming Student Learning with Classroom Communications Systems"

• Clickers: A Gimmick That Works - William Wood, Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Case studies of how four universities decided to standardize on a single personal response system vendor. (2007 article from EDUCAUSE Quarterly.  This good article focuses on the IT issues more than on the pedagogical challenges.

• Case study of how Purdue decided to support personal response systems in many of its classrooms.

  • Purdue resource page for faculty considering 'clickers'

  • Purdue video of faculty demonstrating, discussing PRS uses

• Ohio State U review of classroom response systems  (Word document)

• Duncan, Douglas. (2005). Clickers in the classroom: How to enhance science teaching using classroom response systems. San Francisco: Pearson-Addison Wesley. (Forward by Eric Mazur). ISBN: 0-8053-8728-5.

• Description of PRS use as part of a more general curricular reform aimed at deeper understanding of concepts in engineering at MIT

• "Daily Collegian" article about student response to student response systems at one college. (From Glenn Everett, Stonehill)

Some relevant research; evaluation methods

• Flashlight Evaluation Handbook material on studies of personal response systems

• Difficulty of attributing gains to PRS or any other single component of a more general move toward conceptual learning (2004 study in physics by Pollock)

• Carmen Fies 2005 Ph.D. dissertation looking at the impact of anonymity. Study is aware of the importance of the nature of the questions in PRS use.

• Evaluation of a PRS use (2005) in accounting at U Waterloo - looks at pedagogy but ignores the nature of the questions students answer.