A major difficulty when teaching hundreds of students in a large lecture hall is the inability to engage students during a class period. Instructors of such courses are lucky if they can connect with even 10 percent of students in some of these classes. Without a sense of connection with the instructor and other students, student learning opportunities can be compromised.

One way to meet the challenge of engaging students in large classes is to use "personal response systems" or "clickers." These systems include individual responders (clickers) owned by each student and a software program that projects questions, collects individual student responses and projects graphs of all responses. Recent technological advances make this a system worth considering if you want to enhance active learning in a large class, get an immediate sense of how well students understand the material, involve reluctant students, or have the opportunity to adjust your teaching based on student responses.

Resources

• Adobe Connect Breeze recording of Tuesday, November 3, 2009 "Clickers: Best practices" workshop
• Penn State’s Clicker System - Interwrite PRS
  Contact Dave Test at dmt155@psu.edu or 863-0800
• Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current research and best-practice tips, by Jane E. Caldwell
• Clickers in the Classroom: Pedagogical best practices and quiz-writing recommendations (pdf), University of Guelph, used with permission
• J.R. Stowell, and J. M. Nelson. 2007. Benefits of electronic audience response systems on student participation, learning, and emotion. Teaching of Psychology 34: 253-258.