Teaching and Learning with Clickers in Higher Education

Abstract

Interactive technologies make classroom experience more engaging and enjoyable. Students get much more involved in class discussions in the presence of such technologies and tend to learn more through student-student and student-instructor interactions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether student response systems (i.e., clickers) influence student learning and performance. Overall, our findings show that students were satisfied with the use of clickers especially in increasing their participation and engagement in class. A regression analysis is employed to estimate the magnitude of clickers ’ impact in two different disciplines. The regression results show that the use of clickers had positive and significant impact on student final course grades. In particular, students who used clickers as part of their course instruction received 4.7% higher course grades on average compared to the students in the non-clicker class when controlling for student abilities and characteristics. The outcome of this study suggests that clickers are useful tools in enhancing student learning and performance. Technology is becoming a vital component of the modern classroom and twenty-first-century learners need twenty-first-century tools to enhance their learning. Student response systems, also known as personal response systems and “clickers, ” cater exactly to this need, and represent some of the best and newest educational technologies available today. These innovative assessment tools are easy to master, lead to increased classroom engagement and motivation, and can be used at any grade level. Research on the benefits of clickers has shown that students become more engaged and enjoy using these tools (e.g., MacGeorge et al., 2008). A growing number of case studies discuss the use of clicker systems in