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Thriving in Academe
Best Practices

Engaging Classes with Clickers

Meredeth McCoy (Mathematics, Columbia State Community College) engages her developmental mathematics students with one of the games her clicker system provides. Students earn points toward a quiz grade by answering questions correctly. The system displays the fastest responders for each question, and students earn bonus points for answering first. She finds that this game engages her students because it is competitive but not punitive, since students receive full credit for an answer even if it is not first. She finds this game works especially well as a test review.

Weston Dripps (Earth and Environmental Science, Furman University) raises the issue of climate change with students in his introductory course by showing them a clip of the movie The Day after Tomorrow. He then probes their views on climate change by asking a series of clicker questions designed to identify their misconceptions that are sometimes brought to the surface after viewing the movie clip. He uses the information gathered through these clicker questions to shape his subsequent classes on climate change, focusing on the most common misconceptions, which tend to vary with each new group of students. He sometimes has his students answer the same questions again a few classes later and then displays their responses to the earlier set of questions to show them how much they have learned.

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