Classroom Response Systems

What research tells us about learning and how that can and should be used to guide the design and use of educational technology. This was the Keynote session from the 2008 Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference (COLTT).

How can a university community collaborate to prioritize requests for new academic technologies, focus resources, and meet instructional needs? This session will first provide an overview of the selection and implementation process for a classroom clicker system at one university. Next it will address best practices in classroom use, starting with the question, How do you engage freshman in a required survey course of American history? Find out how an instructional technologist reaches into his magician's bag of tricks to see what will work over the course of an academic year.

Mark Werner reviews Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases, written by David A. Banks.

In order to evaluate student opinion as well as the impact on students of an active learning methodology of two face-to-face presentation styles, during a 50-minute session of library research skills, participants attended either a traditional presentation or a modified one, incorporating the use of the PRS. The Personal Response System is a wireless technology in which students, equipped with clickers, respond to a variety of questions posed by the librarian in the course of the presentation. Both types of sessions, offered by the same librarian, included the same research skills content.  Created for the purpose of evaluating various aspects of the library presentation, a questionnaire completed by all students was analyzed.  In the evaluation, the PRS group not only indicated a greater enjoyment of the session but found the presenter to be well organized.  The authors also discuss aspects of using clickers versus employing a traditional classroom setting.

This presentation will outline the process the University of Nebraska at Omaha used to implement a standardized clicker system. The goal was to ensure clickers were employed as an enduring pedagogical tool and not treated as another fad. The challenge was removing the barriers to adoption and creating communities of practice.

How do you actively engage students when they all have laptops in class? Among other techniques, engagement is achieved through focused activities by using collaborative note-taking, student response tools, and content replay. This poster will illustrate uses of DyKnow to help students and faculty achieve this goal.

Electronic response systems and web-based educational software systems use response pads, PDAs, laptops, and tablet PCs to encourage active learning. This overview will describe available mobile and wireless technologies; identify their capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses; and offer examples of how they are used to enhance and assess student engagement and learning.

This 2006 paper on classroom reponse systems was presented at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference, Chicago, Illinois. This paper asks the question: Does the use of PRS increase student engagement during class and improve student understanding of course material?

This resource is a bibliography of articles on classroom response systems (CRSs). Most of the articles present some form of research on the effectiveness or impact of CRSs on student learning.

Standardizing on a single clicker system addresses problems arising from use of multiple student response systems, from technical support to student costs.