EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION WITH THE CLICK OF A BUTTON: CLICKERS AS A HIGH-IMPACT PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE IN GEOSCIENCES

In the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech a “Resources and the Environment” course has been taught to both Geoscience majors and non-majors in a large lecture format for more than 10 years (average class size of approximately 200 students). Since 2011, Clicker student response systems have been used in this course (Immerwahr, J. 2009). Student or personal response systems – “clickers” – are a popular technological innovation found in many lecture-based college classrooms (Boyle & Nichol, 2003; Mayer et al, 2009; McConnell & Doolittle, 2012). At their most basic level, clickers represent a convenient tool for taking attendance and increasing class participation in large classes (Kolikant, Drane, & Calkins, 2010). Clickers give the Professor the ability to poll student attitudes on many different subjects as well as evaluate content related understanding using multiple choice and/or true/false questions. Pre and post testing has been conducted on 15 to 20 content related questions for more than 8 years. Data analysis shows classroom averages on the multiple choice and true/false questions to be approximately equal to 50% for the pre-test mean and ranging from 80 to 95% on the post-test mean. Only recently with the use of Clickers have we been able to start to identify student misconceptions of the material and document student short and long term retention and “learning”. Data collected using Clickers have identified numerous examples where there have been challenges in terms of changing student’s original misconceptions. In collaboration with my co-author who is an assessment professional with a background in educational psychology we evaluated how the findings align with educational research and cognitive psychology vis-à-vis how students learn, and what we as educators need to do to help promote the ultimate goal of college teaching – long-term retention and transfer (Halpern & Hakel, 2003).