University of Delaware Responds to Classroom Clickers

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Case Study

University of Delaware Responds to Classroom Clickers

"Have you ever found yourself standing in front of your class in the middle of a lecture and wondering what in the world is going on in the minds of your students?" --Douglas Duncan, University of Colorado, from the book, Clickers in the Classroom

8/14/2007

By Linda L Briggs

Any instructor who has had the experience Duncan describes can appreciate the idea of using clickers, or personal response devices, to gauge student participation and understanding. At the University of Delaware, with nearly 20,000 students, clickers are not only engaging students during class, they're starting to be used for homework assignments and as campus-wide polling devices.

Clickers are small wireless keypads that allow students to respond electronically to instructor questions at various points during class. They're generally especially useful in large lecture classes, where keeping all students engaged and at a similar level of understanding can be challenging.

The university adopted the devices as a standard last fall, according to Janet de Vry, University of Delaware's manager of instructional services within the IT user services department. Since then, it has installed receivers in every classroom seating 35 students or more.

The devices are being used heavily in introductory sciences, de Vry said, including biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology, and are starting to show up in social sciences classes such as political science. "In any class," she said, "if you can know what your students know before you teach, and know what they know afterwards, that's fantastic."

To use clickers in class, instructors plug their laptop computers into the receivers through a USB cable. An instructor installs the free software, then issues a simple command during class to display questions created ahead of time.

System Considerations
The university decided to address the clicker issue last year when it realized that faculty members were experimenting on their own with various devices. Fearing that students might eventually be asked to purchase several different clickers for different classes, and that IT would be asked to support a variety of devices, a committee began researching a single university-wide personal response system option.

Although de Vry led the committee, members consisted mostly of faculty members, who, owing to their experimentation, had a good idea of what they wanted in a student response device. Research led the group to eventually select Interwrite PRS RF clickers from Interwrite Learning. The devices contain not only a keypad, but--in a feature that the committee found compelling--a short LCD display panel that can show text typed by the user. Support for both Mac OS X- and Windows-based systems was also important. "It was the best tradeoff between ease of use, functionality, and cost," de Vry said. "You might be tempted to get a simpler [model], if you didn't have faculty with experience with other [devices]."

The Interwrite clickers also use radio frequencies to communicate with the receivers, rather than infrared light, which is also commonly used in such devices. According to de Vry, feedback from professors who had used different devices indicated that because infrared requires line of sight to communicate, it can be problematic in some classroom situations.