May 2007 — Hardware
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Press '2' for 'Not Guilty'
A six-week research project demonstrates the potential applications of personal response systems, including helping to settle a debate on the Lizzie Borden trial.
MARLENE OSBORN HAD never used a personal
response system before her life science class took part in
a study last fall at Kent State University's Research Center
for Educational Technology. She and her Roberts Middle
School seventh-graders from Cuyahoga Falls, OH, spent six
weeks making use of the center's technology-enabled AT&T
Classroom, which features clicker systems, videoconferencing
and teleconferencing units, and interactive whiteboards.
The project intended to measure the technology's impact on
teaching and learning.
Although it was her first time with a personal response system, which is normally used to gauge student comprehension in the midst of a lesson, Osborn took the technology to a whole other territory: to elicit students' opinions on an issue they were studying. She used the systems during a videoconference with a Harvard University professor and two genetic scientists to gather answers to several questions regarding the legal and moral implications of stem cell research.
"It was amazing to get the responses that we did get from the students," Osborn says. "I think the students felt free to answer honestly because it was truly anonymous-I had no idea who had which clicker. It was a jump-start for some really good discussions."
Students are conscious of how well they fit in. They are swayed by what's going on. The [anonymity of the clickers] takes that totally out of the picture.- Marlene Osborn, Roberts Middle School
Personal response systems, or clickers, as they are known, have been around now for about a decade and are quickly becoming standard equipment in the 21st-century classroom. Their growing use in education coincides with their emergence in other areas. The 2006 World Congress used personal response systems to enable its 2,000-plus participants to cast votes on the issues at hand. American Idol is famous for allowing the audience to weigh in via a personal response system-the telephone-on which aspiring pop star should be heave-hoed. The most essential household appliance, the TV remote, is the original clicker, allowing the viewer to vote yay or nay on a given program.
The technology is lauded for enabling instructors to immediately discern through spot quizzes how well students are grasping concepts, or even whether they are paying attention, which ultimately can lead to propagating and reinforcing student involvement. A 2005 study, "Teaching With Student Response System Technology: A Survey of K-12 Teachers," by SRI International and a team of researchers from UCLA, University of California-Davis, and Santa Clara University, found that teachers are generally using clickers for both assessment and instruction, more so for summative assessment than formative assessment. In other words, instructors are using the devices more for determining whether students understood a whole lesson or unit than for adjusting their instruction in real time based on student responses.
