The Clicker Instructional Model
Linda Caraher, a Grade 2 teacher at Cherry Brook Primary, uses clickers with her interactive SmartBoard to gauge her students’ progress with the concepts being learned. For instance, she might show a reading comprehension activity on the whiteboard (like the “Penguin” example shown here) and ask the students to answer several multiple choice questions with their clickers. Immediately, she has the results and sees who needs to meet with her in a small group for further instruction. Or, she can use the clickers in the morning for a quick assessment, and then during Reader's Workshop, pull the children who might have missed the morning assessment question into one group. The software program for the Smart Response system also provides a spreadsheet with the students’ scores. The clickers even make DRP assessments more fun and provide Linda with immediate feedback. A DRP assessment moves from easier questions to more difficult questions. (Examples also included below.)
The kids love the clickers as well. They actually get excited to take a test when they see the clickers come out. According to Linda they beg, "This is cool! Can we do more?"
Linda collected some simple data about the impact of the clickers on students’ learning. She had her class complete several simple reading comprehension exercises in which students identified the ‘best answer’ to a multiple choice question (see below). When using the clickers, the students were more focused and were significantly more accurate -- from about 75% (paper/pencil)to 95% correct (clickers). Linda then asked the students to answer an open-ended question explaining their choice, and they more eagerly participated in this activity as well. As a result, the class scores had improved, probably due to the increased interest level of the students and their desire to have their correct answer show up in graph.
The Everyday Instructional Benefits
First, and foremost, they make 100% on-task attention more likely. They are enticing to students. Every student responds to every question posed by the teacher, and the teacher waits until every clicker has entered a response. Second, the teacher has immediate understanding of whether or not the class 'gets it'. In conventional instruction, even if every hand is raised after the teacher asks a question, only one student actually answers. If the student is right, does this mean the class understands?
Third, each student has the chance, by viewing the class graph, to compare his or her answer to the rest of the class. Finally, the teacher can pinpoint and correct misunderstandings, as in, “Eight of you thought ‘D’ was the right answer. Let’s look at what may have been misleading...”
'Clickers' are spreading. Principal Joe Scheideler at CMS is exploring the use of clickers in his Language Arts classrooms.
CLOZE assessments, such as this one, progress from easy to difficult.
The History of Clickers
Linda collected some simple data about the impact of the clickers on students’ learning. She had her class complete several simple reading comprehension exercises in which students identified the ‘best answer’ to a multiple choice question (see below). When using the clickers, the students were more focused and were significantly more accurate -- from about 75% (paper/pencil)to 95% correct (clickers). Linda then asked the students to answer an open-ended question explaining their choice, and they more eagerly participated in this activity as well. As a result, the class scores had improved, probably due to the increased interest level of the students and their desire to have their correct answer show up in graph.
The Everyday Instructional Benefits
First, and foremost, they make 100% on-task attention more likely. They are enticing to students. Every student responds to every question posed by the teacher, and the teacher waits until every clicker has entered a response. Second, the teacher has immediate understanding of whether or not the class 'gets it'. In conventional instruction, even if every hand is raised after the teacher asks a question, only one student actually answers. If the student is right, does this mean the class understands?
Third, each student has the chance, by viewing the class graph, to compare his or her answer to the rest of the class. Finally, the teacher can pinpoint and correct misunderstandings, as in, “Eight of you thought ‘D’ was the right answer. Let’s look at what may have been misleading...”
'Clickers' are spreading. Principal Joe Scheideler at CMS is exploring the use of clickers in his Language Arts classrooms.
CLOZE assessments, such as this one, progress from easy to difficult.
The History of Clickers
The technology began on college campuses, where professors began using them for en mass quizzes and exams in those large lecture hall settings. They could post a multiple choice or true and false question in a PowerPoint presentation, ask each student to respond with his or her personal remote (which was coded to software on the professor’s laptop), and then view the answers for each student and for the entire class. The professor knew two things: each student’s individual score on the quiz or test, and how well the class did as a whole on each question. It’s also the same technology used on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” when the contestant asks to poll the audience, and the audience members use radio-signal responders to select A, B, C, or D. A graph then displays the results.
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