If you’re afraid to raise your hand in lecture, have no fear. Now you just have to push a button. Thanks to Personal Response Systems (PRS) clickers, tools that allow students to submit answers to practice problems posed in lecture, students are gaining a different learning experience in big lectures. Though they are only present in specific classes at Stanford, PRS clickers may become more visible on campus as research continues to show their effectiveness.
“I love the PRS system. It breaks up the lecture into check points and makes me feel confident that I’m keeping up with everything that was just discussed –something which is vital in a large lecture classroom,” said Alex Ritchie ’14, a student in Chemistry 31B.
Recently, PRS clickers have been appearing in classrooms all over the country. Professors at schools such as Harvard, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Ohio State and the University of Arizona have been implementing PRS use into the format of their lectures as a way to assess the overall understanding and progress of students. PRS clickers allow students to engage in large lecture classes where they might feel like one among many, and in general, both professors and students approve.
Chemistry 31B professor Jennifer Schwartz is seeing the benefits of the devices in her large classes.
“If you walk into a lecture hall during a clicker question, you will understand instantly why clickers can make a substantial difference in the amount of student engagement in a large lecture,” Schwartz said. “Instead of students struggling to stay awake, you find 200 students thinking and talking about an important Chemistry concept.”
Schwartz believes that the importance of the PRS lies not in whether the student answers the question correctly, but rather in the student’s realization of his or her own confusion.
“The fact that a student has struggled with that material, even for a few seconds, is helpful to their learning process,” she added. “If they got the question wrong, it helps them to identify what misconception they might have had about a problem.”
Ritchie agreed that using her PRS clicker is a red flag for material she doesn’t understand.
“Clickers help me learn because they identify the little things I may have missed,” Ritchie said. “After a PRS response, the professor reviews the question with the class. It gets you thinking about how well you’re understanding the material, and helps if you’re confused because you get to discuss the question with friends around you.”
Katie Topper ’14 said that PRS clickers also force students to stay engaged, particularly in her Physics 41 lecture.
“Clickers really help because they make you think and work out a problem, instead of just listening to the concept from the lecturer,” she said.
In addition to administering practice problems, PRS clickers also present a unique opportunity for professors to get almost instant feedback about their classes’ level of comprehension. If students don’t understand a concept, the professor can gauge this through analyzing PRS responses and then tailor the lecture to address a specific problem area.
Though its main purpose is to engage students, a PRS clicker is also a way for professors to see which students are consistently attending lecture. In Chemistry 31B, 50 points of the final grade [MB1] are calculated from PRS responses, providing students a large incentive to attend classes.
“PRS clickers make people go to lecture, since their responses are recorded,” said Hunter Kodama ’14, another Chemistry 31B student. “And even if the owners aren’t present in class, their PRS clickers are.”
Ritchie also pointed out that the format of the clicker response system highlights the key concepts of a lecture.
“PRS questions are timed, so you have to pick out the main points of the problem quickly,” Ritchie said. “With the time constraint, you are forced to realize quickly what the most important points are.”
But not all professors have hopped onto the PRS clicker bandwagon. Although Marcelo Clerici-Arias, professor of Economics 1A, thinks that clickers can enhance lectures, he also finds their use somewhat limiting.
“The employment of clickers is constrained to multiple choice questions, or sometimes numerical questions,” he said. “Text-based questions are very difficult to implement with clickers, and of course, graphs are impossible.”
Though he has used PRS clickers for the past nine years in his introductory Economics classes, Clerici-Arias recently decided to remove them from his lectures. Starting this quarter, he is trying out a program called “Ubiquitous Presenter,” which is software that allows multiple choice, text, image and ink entries from students.
Though it does offer a wider variety of response options, the software is not without flaws.
“It opens up the issue of computer misuse in the classroom and the possibility of online distractions,” Clerici-Arias noted, suggesting that PRS clickers may not be leaving the Stanford classroom anytime soon.