How To Check If Hitt Clicker Is Registered

Classroom Response Systems ("Clickers")

Cite this guide: Bruff, D. (2010). Classroom Response Systems ("Clickers"). Vanderbilt University Center for Instruction. Retrieved [todaysdate] from https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/clickers/.

Welcome to the Heart for Didactics's introduction to education with classroom response systems ("clickers"). On this folio you'll find strategies for using clickers in your teaching, as well as logistical information on using clickers with your courses at Vanderbilt. For a more consummate treatment of the onetime, meet my volume, Education with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, available in the CFT library. I too blog regularly most classroom response systems on my personal blog, Agile Learning.

What is a CRS?
Teaching with a CRS
- Types of Questions
- Types of Activities
- Examples
Why Use a CRS?
Challenges in Using a CRS
CRS at Vanderbilt
- News Manufactures on CRSs
CRS at Other Schools
Bibliography (opens a dissever Web page)

What Is a CRS?

A classroom response system (sometimes called a personal response organization, student response organization, or audience response system) is a set up of hardware and software that facilitates education activities such as the following.

A teacher poses a multiple-choice question to his or her students via an overhead or calculator projector.
Each student submits an answer to the question using a handheld transmitter (a "clicker") that beams a radio-frequency signal to a receiver attached to the instructor's figurer.
Software on the instructor'due south computer collects the students' answers and produces a bar nautical chart showing how many students chose each of the respond choices.
The teacher makes "on the fly" instructional choices in response to the bar chart by, for example, leading students in a discussion of the merits of each respond selection or asking students to discuss the question in small groups.

Videos

Clickers in Action – In this short video, Russell James from the University of Georgia explains how he uses clickers in the classroom.

Terminology

The Vanderbilt Center for Teaching has decided to use the term "classroom response system" to depict this technology. The term "audition response arrangement" is another popular term, but some faculty see that term as implying that students are passive members of an audience, which runs counter to their use of this applied science in getting students actively engaged with class material during course. The term "personal response arrangement" is also popular, but we have decided non to use it, since it happens to be the brand name of a item vendor's arrangement. "Student response organisation" is also a useful term, just it doesn't highlight the utilize of these systems in the classroom and could refer to an online response system of some kind.

"Professor Ross Cheit put it to the students in his Ethics and Public Policy class at Brown University: Are you morally obliged to report cheating if you know about information technology? The room began to hum, but no one then much as raised a hand.

"Still, within 90 seconds, Cheit had roughly 150 pupil responses displayed on an overhead screen, plotted as a multicolored bar graph — 64 percentage said aye, 35 percent, no."

— "No Wrong Answer: Click It," Associated Press, May 14, 2005.

Education with a CRS

Types of Questions

Many instructors see multiple-choice questions as limited to testing students' recall of facts. Nonetheless, multiple-choice clicker questions can actually serve many other purposes in the form, including assessing students' higher-social club thinking skills. Since clicker questions tin can be used not only to assess students only to engage them, some very constructive clicker questions are quite dissimilar than multiple-choice questions that might appear on exams.

Here are a few types of clicker questions.

Recall Questions: These questions ask students to call back facts, concepts, or techniques relevant to class. They are often used to come across if students did the reading, remember important points from prior classes, or have memorized key facts. They rarely generate give-and-take, notwithstanding, and don't require college-order thinking skills.

Conceptual Understanding Questions: These questions go across recall and assess students' agreement of of import concepts. Answer choices to these questions are often based on common educatee misconceptions, and so these questions work well to help instructors identify and accost their students' misconceptions. Questions asking students to classify examples, match characteristics with concepts, select the best explanation for a concept, or translate amongst different means of representing an idea are examples of conceptual understanding questions.
Awarding Questions: These questions require students to apply their noesis and understanding to particular situations and contexts. Awarding questions often enquire students to make a decision or choice in a given scenario, connect form content to "existent-world" situations, implement procedures or techniques, or predict the outcome of experiments or even their peers' response to a subsequent question.

Disquisitional Thinking Questions: These questions operate at the college levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, requiring students to analyze relationships among multiple concepts or make evaluations based on particular criteria. Often these questions are "1-best-answer questions," questions that include multiple respond choices that accept merit. Students are asked to select the one best answer from these choices. One-best-answer questions aren't appropriate for exams, since the reasons students provide for or against answer choices are of more than involvement than their item answer selections. Still, these questions can exist very effective in preparing students to appoint in class discussions well-nigh their reasons.

Student Perspective Questions: These are questions that inquire students to share their opinions, experiences, or demographic data. These questions practise non have correct answers, but by surfacing the various perspectives of students in a grade, they can aid both instructors and students better sympathise those perspectives. They tin can often generate rich word, peculiarly questions near ethical, legal, or moral issues. They can besides help students connect their personal experiences to more abstract form content. The anonymity that clickers provide is oftentimes an essential ingredient in asking these kinds of questions.

Conviction Level Questions: Asking students a content question, then post-obit that by request students to charge per unit their confidence in their answers (high, medium, or low) can heighten the usefulness of information on student learning provided by the start question. Prompting students to appraise their conviction can as well aid in metacognition–learning about ane'southward own learning. Instructors tin can also ask "predictive" confidence level questions by request students how confident they are that they could correctly answer some question or attain some task in which they have not all the same engaged.

Monitoring Questions: These are questions designed to provide instructors with information most how their students are approaching the learning process in their courses. For instance, 1 calendar week before a paper assignment is due, instructors might enquire students whether or not they accept completed rough drafts every bit a manner to approximate their progress. Asking students how long they took to complete an assignment they have just turned in tin provide instructors with useful data about the difficulty of the assignment. Clicker questions tin also be used to see if students recollect skillful communication or form policies shared on a showtime-mean solar day-of-form course syllabus. The questions that appear on end-of-semester course evaluations likewise make useful monitoring questions at the midpoint of the semester.

Classroom Experiments: Classroom response systems can also be used to collect data from students for classroom experiments frequently used in the social sciences. Often data generated by students during form can be used to make points about social beliefs. By allowing these data to exist collected and analyzed during course, clickers tin can bring a sense of immediacy and relevance to these kinds of experiments.

Types of Activities

Teaching with a CRS can have a number of directions. Teachers will want to match activities to class content, time constraints, learning objectives, and their own instruction styles. Some possibilities for CRS activities include the following, listed more or less in order of increasing levels of student engagement.

Attendance: Clickers tin be used to accept attendance directly (e.1000. asking students to respond to the question "Are you here today?") or indirectly by determining which students used their clickers during class.

Summative Assessment: Clickers tin can exist used for graded activities, such as multiple-choice quizzes or fifty-fifty tests. Some brands of clickers allow for a "student-paced" style in which students respond questions on a printed test at their ain pace.

Formative Assessment: Clickers can be used to pose questions to students and collect their answers for the purpose of providing real-time information about student learning to both the instructor and the students. Students can use this feedback to monitor their own learning, and instructors can use information technology to alter how they manage form "on the fly" in response to student learning needs. Some brands of clickers allow students to annals their confidence level (high, medium, or low) along with their answer, providing more detailed feedback to the instructor.Some instructors assign participation grades to these kinds of determinative assessments to encourage students to participate. Other instructors assign points for correct answers to encourage students to take these questions more seriously. Other instructors do a mix of both, assigning partial credit for incorrect answers.

Homework Collection: Some brands of clickers allow students to record their answers to multiple-choice or gratuitous response homework questions exterior of class and submit their answers via the clickers at the offset of class.

Discussion Warm-Upward: Posing a question, giving students time to think about information technology and record their answers via clickers, so displaying the results can be an effective way to warm a class up for a form-wide discussion. Compared with the approach of taking the beginning hand that is raised after a question is asked, this arroyo gives all students time to remember about and commit to an respond, setting the stage for greater word participation.

Contingent Educational activity: Since information technology tin can occasionally be challenging to determine what students sympathize and what they do non sympathize, clickers tin can exist used to gauge that in real-time during class and modify one'south lesson programme accordingly. If the clicker information evidence that students understand a given topic, then the teacher can motion on to the next one. If not, then more than time can exist spent on the topic, perhaps involving more lecture, class discussion, or some other clicker question.This arroyo has been called "agile teaching" past Beatty et al. (2006), who write, "This contrasts with the common do of teaching according to a 'ballistic' lesson programme: designing a plan for an entire class meeting, 'launching' the plan, hoping that it hits reasonably close to its target, and waiting for the side by side exam to know for certain." Certainly there are other ways to determine if students are understanding course material as i progresses through a course, but clickers can provide a convenient mode of doing so. Come across also Draper & Brown (2004) for more on this arroyo.

Peer Pedagogy: The teacher poses a question to his or her students. The students ponder the question silently and transmit their individual answers using the clickers. The teacher checks the histogram of student responses. If pregnant numbers of students cull the wrong answer, the instructor instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbour. Afterward a few minutes of discussion, the students submit their answers once more. This technique often (but non always!) results in more students choosing the right answer as a consequence of the peer instruction phase of the activity. This is a adequately simple way to use clickers to appoint a large number of students in discussions about grade textile. This approach tin can likewise prepare the phase for a class-broad discussion that more fully engages all students. See Mazur (1997) for more on this approach.

Repeated Questions: In the peer instruction approach described in a higher place, students respond to a given question twice–one time after thinking nigh their answer individually and once more later discussing it with their neighbor. Some instructors ask the aforementioned question several times, with different activities in between rounds of voting designed to help students better answer the question. For instance, an instructor might have the students respond the question individually, then talk over information technology with their neighbour and reply, and then participate in a class-wide word and reply, so mind to a mini-lecture on the topic and respond. For particularly challenging questions, this can be an effective technique for helping students find and explore course material.

Question-Driven Education: This approach combines contingent educational activity and peer instruction. Lesson plans consist entirely of clicker questions. Which questions are asked depends entirely on how students answer the questions. An instructor might come into class with a stack of clicker questions, with multiple questions on each topic. As students perform well on clicker questions, the teacher moves on to questions on new topics. Equally students perform poorly, the instructor asks further questions on the aforementioned topic. The instructor does non have a lesson program in the traditional sense when using this approach. Instead, the course of the grade is determined reactively to demonstrated student learning needs. See Beatty et al. (2006) for more on this arroyo.

"Cull Your Ain Adventure" Classes: In this technique, an instructor poses a trouble forth with several possible approaches to solving information technology–perhaps approaches suggested by students during class. The teacher has the students vote on which approach to pursue first, so explores that approach with the students. Afterwards, the students vote on which approach to pursue adjacent.

Examples

Economics In this podcast interview, Stephen Buckles, senior lecturer in economics here at Vanderbilt Academy, describes his apply of a classroom response system in his large undergraduate courses.

Mathematics Project Math QUEST is a project funded past the National Science Foundation to write and test clicker questions for use in linear algebra and differential equations courses. Their questions are available online, and their resource page contains links to other question banks in the field of mathematics.

General Physics (PowerPoint) Shane Hutson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt, describes his utilize of the H-ITT classroom response system in a general physics course in this PowerPoint file. He used a CRS for ConcepTests (checks of student agreement during lectures), interactive demos (having students guess the results of a physics sit-in immediately before the demo), and reading quizzes (graded assignments designed to run into if students did their readings before form).

Architectural Engineering The Interactive Technology to Meliorate the Classroom Experience (INTICE) project at the College of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin evaluated the use of a CRS in one of their architectural engineering core classes. Their report, available at the to a higher place link, provides example questions and details their evaluation of the CRS as a learning tool.

Why Utilise a CRS?

A teacher can use a CRS to…

…Maintain students' attention during a lecture. Studies show that most people's attention lapses after 10 to eighteen minutes of passive listening. Inserting a few CRS-facilitated activities every so oftentimes during a lecture can help maintain students' attention. See The "Change-up" in Lectures for more on this idea.

…Promote agile student engagement during a lecture. Posing well-chosen questions to students during lecture and expecting answers from each pupil can crusade students to reflect on and assimilate form content during class.

…Promote discussion and collaboration among students during class with group exercises that require students to discuss and come to a consensus.

…Encourage participation from each and every student in a class. Asking a question verbally and calling on the outset educatee to raise his or her hand results in 1 student participating. A CRS-facilitated activity tin involve not i, just all of the students in the class.

…Create a prophylactic space for shy and unsure students to participate in class. A CRS gives students a take chances to reply to a teacher's question silently and privately, enabling pupil who might non typically speak up in class to express their thoughts and opinions. A CRS also enables students to respond anonymously to sensitive ethical, legal, and moral questions.

…Cheque for student agreement during class. By asking CRS-facilitated questions, teachers can determine if students understand important points or distinctions raised in course. They need non wait until homework is turned in or exams are completed to do then. Instead they tin receive feedback on a lecture during that same lecture.

…Teach in a way that adapts to the immediate learning needs of his or her students. If a histogram of pupil answers shows that a significant number of students chose incorrect answers to a question, then the instructor can revisit or analyze the points he or she only made in grade. If a histogram shows that most students chose the correct answers to a question, then the teacher can move on to another topic.

…Take omnipresence and to rapidly form in-form quizzes, provided that each transmitter is assigned to a unique pupil over the length of a course. Note that different CRS systems provide different levels of back up for anonymous and not-anonymous usage.

…Add a little drama to class. There is often a sense of expectation as wait for the histogram to appear showing how their classmates answered a given question.

For more than on reasons to use a CRS, see our bibliography of scholarly articles on the effectiveness of CRS, organized by subject area.

Challenges in Using a CRS

While a CRS can facilitate a variety of student-active teaching activities, a teacher using a CRS should exist aware of the post-obit challenges.

As with any use of calculator applied science in the classroom, technical bug tin arise. A teacher using a CRS should allow time at the outset of class to set up-upwardly and troubleshoot the CRS. Also, not-CRS back-up activities should be planned in the event of a full CRS failure.

Getting started with a CRS takes some time. Electric current systems are easier to acquire and use than older systems, but there is however some start-up time required. Having an experienced user effectually is helpful.Adapting lesson plans to have reward of clickers takes time, as well. However, information technology is often not difficult to get-go small by adding a question or two to each course, peculiarly if the instructor has a adept idea where students are likely to have difficulties.

Nigh CRS technology restricts teachers to posing multiple-choice questions, and writing effective multiple-option questions can be challenging. Knowledge of common student mistakes and misconceptions can be useful in designing wrong answers to multiple-pick questions. Asking students open-concluded questions so adapting their responses into later multiple-choice questions can also be constructive. Some instructors have student suggestions for respond choices during course. Others have reward of existing banks of questions in their disciplines.

For advice on writing multiple-choice questions, see Constructing Written Examination Questions for the Basic and Clinical Sciences, a National Board of Medical Examiners booklet on writing constructive examination questions with advice on true-fake questions, one-best-reply questions, extended matching questions, and avoiding "testwiseness" and irrelevant difficulty in questions.

Using a CRS in class takes up class time. If students practise non proceed possession of transmitters between classes, some time will be spent at the beginning of grade distributing the transmitters. Moreover, a few minutes volition be needed for students to transmit their answers, and form time will be used discussing student responses.Some teachers have responded to this challenge by relying on pre-class reading assignments to convey portions of course material. Others employ the time limit function of a CRS (where students are given only and so much time to answer to a given question) to help manage grade time. Others feel that students need to main certain material before moving on, and using clickers to ensure that mastery is worth the actress time. Others feel that using clickers to become feedback on student understanding actually allows them to progress through textile more quickly by determining what topics they can safely omit.

The wrong answers that students choose in response to a multiple-selection question tin reveal that the students have misconceptions, but knowing that students have misconceptions does not necessarily reveal what those misconceptions are. Teachers using CRS questions sometimes find it surprising when large numbers of students choose certain wrong answers, and further classroom give-and-take is sometimes needed to explore why students chose the incorrect answers they did.

When a teacher uses a CRS to check for educatee understanding during form, if it turns out the students do not agreement a particular concept or application, then the teacher may have to alter his or her lesson programme "on the fly." This tin be challenging for teachers who are used to preparing their lessons thoroughly in advance or who do not think on their feet as well as some. Instructors often must decide when to move on to the next topic, what to do most students who answer incorrectly when it is time to move on, what to practice if just a small proportion of students get a question correct, and what to do if students are still dislocated after the instructor gives his or her best explanation.

Many instructors use clickers to lead into class-wide discussions, and leading class-broad discussions can be challenging for instructors used to just lecturing. Run into our Teaching Guide on discussions for advice on leading class-wide discussions.

"Sometimes students will have questions that as an instructor you might not take thought of. And I utilize them the next twenty-four hour period in course by only billowy them back to the students. Instead of explaining to them what the answer to the question is, I just pose their question [to the grade using a CRS]. I've had some students come to me at the end of the lecture saying, 'Professor Mazur, that question you asked me, that was exactly the question I had.' And I look at the student and say, 'That was your question!'"

— Eric Mazur, Professor Physics at Harvard University

CRS at Vanderbilt

Top Chapeau is the first classroom response system to exist adopted campus-wide at Vanderbilt. Top Hat will be available to kinesthesia, students, and staff across campus starting July 2017. Instructors didactics with "clickers" are invited to consider Top Chapeau for in-form student polling.

Pinnacle Hat is a "bring your own device" (BYOD) classroom response organization that makes utilise of students' personal mobile devices (phones, tablets, laptops) every bit response devices. BYOD systems offering a number of logistical and pedagogical advantages over traditional, "clicker"-based systems.

Tiptop Hat was selected by a trans-institutional working grouping consisting of more 40 faculty, students, and staff, organized past the Heart for Pedagogy during the 2015-sixteen academic twelvemonth. The grouping identified a number of useful features of Top Chapeau in its recommendation:

Support for both multiple-option and costless-response polling questions, including a number of different question types;
Compatibility with PowerPoint for integrating polling questions with slides, along with the ability to run questions on pinnacle of any presentation software;
Student response options via mobile devices including Web, text messaging, and a dedicated mobile app;
Options for sharing polling questions, response distributions, and right answers with students for review after form; and
Integration with Vanderbilt single sign-on and Brightspace grade center.

The Centre for Teaching serves as the administrative home for Top Hat at Vanderbilt, and will coordinates training and support. You can learn how to sign upwardly for your free account and become started using Top Hat by visiting vanderbilt.edu/tophat.

Questions near the Top Hat adoption? Contact CFT assistant manager for digital media, Rhett McDaniel.

News Articles

With Classroom Response Systems, New Way of Learning Is Only a 'Click' Away,Vanderbilt Register, Apr 2007 – featuring Derek Bruff from the Vanderbilt Center for Educational activity and Department of Mathematics
Learning a Click Abroad in VUSN Nutrition Class, VUMC Reporter, November 2005 — Featuring Jamie Pope and Bettina Lippert from the Vanderbilt School of Nursing

CRS at Other Schools

University of Western Ontario The PressWestern Project provides support to the University of Western Ontario clicker-using customs. The project's student folio features short videos explaining how to set up clickers and use them in class. The projection's faculty page provides explanation of the technology of clickers and discussing how clickers can be useful in teaching.

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