Classroom+Clickers

=Classroom Clickers Come to Uniondale= S. West Even prior to the advent of the game show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” audience participation has been a key ingredient in successful TV game shows. What better way to engage audience members but to hand them a remote and have them key in their responses? This is the concept behind the Student Response Systems (SRS), a tool with three components—software, the individual student responder, and a receiver that connects to the responder. They are commonly called classroom clickers and have made their debut in the high school science department.

Teachers are concerned with how to actively engage students, evaluate students’ understanding, and respond and re-teach concepts. The SRS create an environment in which students feel safe about responding since their responses are anonymous. A teacher can pose multiple choice questions, there is an ease in counting student responses, and the information can be immediately aggregated and disaggregated. Additional educational benefits of the systems are that they engage students, promote collaboration, and teachers and students gain instant feedback. Clickers also stimulate the processing of data, ideas, and viewpoints, create an environment where discussions ensue once the data is tabulated and posted, increase learning desire by providing students with peer group comparison, and encourage a collaborative environment in which discussions follow the tabulation of the data.

When clickers are used creatively in an environment in which students feel safe by anonymously keying in their responses, when teachers can use the clickers to “think- pair and share,” when instruction can be customized to fit the individual and group needs, when discussions ensue immediately after tabulation, and when concepts that have not been understood are immediately re-taught, then true learning takes place. This is exactly what is happening in high school science classrooms where students are engaged in demonstrating their understanding in this novel way.