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Thriving in Academe

Clickers, a new instructional tool, improve classroom dynamics and provide useful information on how students learn.

Imagine yourself as a student sitting in class. You’re listening and taking notes, trying to make sense of the material. After 10 minutes, your teacher puts a multiple-choice question on the overhead. You reach into your bag and pull out your “clicker”—a handheld device that looks like a TV remote. You read the question and then press B on your clicker, sending your answer to the receiver attached to your teacher’s computer.

A few seconds later, a bar chart pops up on the overhead. You see instantly that only 30 percent of your classmates agreed with your answer. In fact, most of your classmates seem to be split among three different answer choices. You sit up in your seat, curious to know if you answered correctly.
But your teacher doesn’t tell you. Instead, you’re asked to turn to your neighbor and convince her that your answer is the best one. Seconds later the classroom is buzzing with groups of students discussing the question.

Clickers are instructional technologies that can be used to promote active participation, engagement, and discussion among students and to assess student learning in real-time, during class.

Designing effective clicker questions and managing a clicker-enhanced classroom can be challenging, so the following pages provide strategies for making the most of teaching with clickers.

Meet the Author
Derek Bruff is an assistant director at the Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in the mathematics department at Vanderbilt University. He helps faculty and teaching assistants develop and refine their teaching skills and deepen their understanding of the teaching and learning process. In his own mathematics teaching, he emphasizes conceptual understanding and uses clickers to increase student engagement during class. His research interests include teaching with clickers, the role of pre-class reading assignments in mathematics courses, and the place of teaching in the academic hiring process. He earned his Ph.D. at Vanderbilt and spent two years in post-doctoral study at Harvard University. He can be reached at derek.bruff@vanderbilt.edu.

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