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Assessment Technology >> Choose One From Column B
3/1/2007
Perhaps the only drawback to audience response systems is the inability of the technology to snuff out cheating. Calhoun admits that a student easily could give his clicker to a buddy and instruct the buddy to answer accordingly, making it look as if both youngsters were in class. To overcome this temptation, he weights clicker responses to be worth about 10 percent of a student’s overall grade. Calhoun says this figure is sizable enough to provide incentive to come to class, but not too big to spark a strong incentive to cheat. Sure, he’s caught at least two students cheating every semester since the tools were deployed, but considering that Calhoun teaches thousands of students a year, such minuscule numbers are not worth rethinking the entire system.
"I can’t worry about cheating when, on the whole, my students come to class, use the technology to participate, and learn with it," he says, adding that since he started using the technology, student performance has generally been up. Calhoun’s preliminary data shows that in 32-question summative tests, students who used clickers during the lessons answered anywhere from two to four more questions correctly than students who did not use them. "As a professor, I can’t ask for anything more than that," he says.
Student response works a little differently at Ohio State University, where Physics Professor Bill Reay uses devices from Turning Technologies. Instead of requiring students to purchase the clickers, Reay purchased them himself this past year, using $9,000 in grant money allocated to the acquisition of the technology. Now, when students enter Reay’s lecture, they pick up a clicker from a large repository. Throughout the class, as students answer Reay’s questions, his computer tabulates their responses anonymously.
Clearly, since there’s no way for this strategy to link individual students with individual clickers, assessment information is not used to evaluate individual student performance, nor is it connected to a CMS. Instead, Reay says he utilizes the technology exclusively to assess his own teaching. If, for instance, an assessment reveals that a majority of the class does not grasp a concept, Reay will spend more time on it. If an assessment reveals the class is comfortable with a topic, he can advance the lecture without holding it up for those few who may be lagging behind.
"Sure, it helps the class. But the assessment also is a great way for me to get a sense of how many students understand a particular concept before I move on," he says. "It helps me get a sense of what needs explaining, and helps them understand everything as best as they can." The bottom line for OSU: The immediacy of the data provided by clickers has made them an invaluable supplement to traditional assessment methods.
What’s Next
The joystick-like quality of in-class clickers certainly has to be part of their appeal: Ask any college-aged youngster about the future of technology, and he or she is bound to hail the praises of video games. Cool graphics, live action— these are both reasons why analysts at
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