Student engagement is a critical component of effective classroom instruction. Many socio-constructive pedagogies, including active learning and peer instruction, depend upon students not only paying attention to, but actively shaping, the learning environment. Student response devices, such as clickers, are thought to increase student engagement by providing students with regular opportunities to check their comprehension or express their opinions. Claims of increased student engagement due to clicker use are often based upon student self-reports and have only a small correlation with observed learning gains or other measures of attentiveness. This paper compared self-report data, pre- and post-test scores, and a direct test of attentiveness to investigate what effect clicker use has on student engagement. Analyses showed that subjects using clickers were significantly slower to respond to tests of attentiveness than subjects in other conditions. This suggests that using clickers affects what students are able or willing to attend to during a lecture. / text

This study reports middle school astronomy classes that implemented photographs and classroom response systems (CRSs) in a discussion-oriented pedagogy with a curriculum unit for the topics of day-night and cause of seasons. In the new pedagogy, a teacher presented conceptual questions with photographs, her 6th grade students responded using the CRSs, and the teacher facilitated classroom discussion based on the student responses. I collected various data: classroom observation with field-note taking and videotaping, student pre- and post-conception tests, student attitude survey and classroom short surveys, and teacher interviews. Classroom video recordings and teacher interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed with the grounded theory approach. This approach was used to analyze the open responses of the student attitude survey as well. Pre- and post- conception tests consisted of open-ended questions and they were scored based upon rubrics. Numerical data were analyzed with descriptive statistics and simple t-tests. In this study, I answered three research questions: 1) student-teacher discourses and interaction patterns while learning and teaching with the photographs and CRSs in the new pedagogy; 2) 6th grade students’ misconceptions about the concepts of day-night and cause of seasons, and their knowledge gains after they had the intervention; and 3) the students’ and the teacher’s attitude toward the new curriculum and the new pedagogy. Finally, I discuss the student-teacher interaction model and three important teacher-questionings in this pedagogy; levels of misconceptions; and the pedagogical roles of the photographs and CRSs.

abstract: Clickers are a common part of many classrooms across universities. Despite the widespread use, education researchers disagree about how to best use these tools and about how they impact students. Prior work has shown possible differential impacts of clickers based on demographic indicators, such as age, gender, and ethnicity. To explore these topics a two-part project was designed. First, a literature review was completed focusing on past and current clicker practices and the research surrounding them. Second, original data, stratified by demographic characteristics, was collected on student perceptions of clickers. The literature review revealed that not all uses of clickers are created equal. Instructors in higher education first introduced clickers to enhance traditional pedagogies by simplifying common classroom tasks (e.g. grading, attendance, feedback collection). More recently, instructors pair clickers and novel pedagogies. A review of the identified benefits and drawbacks for students and instructors is provided for both approaches. Instructors can use different combinations of technological competency and pedagogical content knowledge that lead to four main outcomes. When instructors have both technological competency and pedagogical content knowledge, all the involved parties, students and instructors, benefit. When instructors have technological competency but lack pedagogical content knowledge, instructors are the main benefactors. When instructors have pedagogical content knowledge alone, students can benefit, but usefulness to the instructor decreases. When instructors have neither technological competency nor pedagogical content knowledge, no party benefits. Beyond these findings, recommendations are provided for future clicker research. Second, the review highlighted that clickers may have a differential impact on students of different demographic groups. To explore this dynamic, an original study on student views of clickers, which included demographic data, was conducted. The original study does not find significantly different enthusiasm for clickers by demographic group, unlike prior studies that explored some of these relationships. However, white students and male students are overrepresented in the group that does not enjoy clickers. This conclusion is supported by visual observations from the means of the demographic groups. Overall, based on the review of the literature and original research, if instructors pair clickers with validated pedagogies, and if researchers continue to study clicker classrooms, including which students like and benefit from clickers, clickers may continue to be a valuable educational technology. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Biology 2020

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