students react positively to IClicker
Magally Zelaya, Staff
Last semester the U of M BookStore sold 2,391 IClickers to students in chemistry, physics, psychology, and sociology, in mostly large first-year classes.
The chemistry department head, Norman Hunter, said that the students’ responses to the classroom response system were “overwhelmingly positive,” as demonstrated in surveys conducted by professors in the department of chemistry.
The IClicker is a hand-held device with six buttons that students can use to register their answers on the instructor’s receiving base that tabulates the answers.
According to the survey taken in one section of Chemistry 1300, 94 per cent of students said the IClicker was easy to use.
Overall, 77 per cent of students felt their experience with IClickers was positive, 14 per cent were neutral, and nine per cent had negative experiences.
University 1 student, Hedeesha Piyaddasa, said he liked using the IClicker in his two courses that required it last semester, even though for the first two weeks he had is set to the wrong frequency. Still, Piyaddasa said, “It was quite helpful because it made me pay attention in class.”
Hunter said, “It really does open up the opportunity to take large classes and create a different scenario where you can get more interaction with students, better feedback from students, and students, I think, in general, are more engaged in the lecture.”
Elena Smirnova, a senior chemistry instructor, said she had reservations before she started using the system in her classes.
“I always try to conduct a lecture smoothly and organize it as [well] as I can. I was terrified that the use of IClickers might change this tradition: software fails, the receiver breaks, I do not get the responses, etc.,” Smirnova wrote in an e-mail to the Manitoban.
Hunter added that taking the time to prepare for the IClicker — including simply organizing lectures around questions for class — is one drawback of the IClicker.
The IClicker also uses up about 10-15 minutes of a lecture, stated Smirnova.
However, she added that the system did help her teaching.
“The use of IClickers revealed that the impression that a large part of my class understood a new concept by giving me a correct answer was sometimes wrong. The display of answer distribution could prove otherwise, and I needed to repeat my explanations over again,” she wrote.
Smirnova will continue to use the system in her first-year classes, but she is not certain she will be using it in her second-year classes, as she has yet to devise appropriate questions.
Though no statistical analysis has been done, both Hunter and Smirnova speculated that the IClicker is helping improve some students’ marks.
“Both Dr. Smirnova and I had the sense that the upper-end students did better than they would have in previous years; so that students who would normally be B students, some of them might have moved from B to B+. And some B+ students might have went to A,” said Hunter.
Hunter reasoned that instant feedback and correction are useful for students who come to class regularly and engage in the lecture.
“If a student misses 35 per cent of the classes, and comes only two out of every three lectures, and forgets the IClicker periodically, and doesn’t get engaged in it, they’re not going to do well, anyway. And the IClicker isn’t going to help them,” he said.
Though Hunter notes that the IClicker is not appropriate for all teaching styles and for all classroom sizes, he does see an advantage for any size class.
“It does allow people to express, without concern about the neighbours — their friends, their colleagues — it allows them to give their opinion uninhibited by what others might think of their opinion,” he said.
Smirnova agreed that anonymity is a benefit of the system. “And it was a nice break of a routine.”
Hunter said that as far he knows, no professors have decided to stop using the IClicker. A full house at an IClicker workshop held on Jan. 10 shows there is continued interest in the classroom response system.
This semester, 347 IClickers have been sold by the U of M BookStore (many of the courses requiring the device are six credit hours that continue into this semester). Twenty-seven have been sold back to the U of M BookStore.
ICLICKER EXIT SURVEY RESULTS
• 94% of students said it was easy to use.
• 84% said it gave them more opportunities to participate in a large class.
• 79% said the IClicker questions helped them better understand course concepts.
• 59% said the number of IClicker questions asked in class was just right, 32% said there were too few.
• 65% said that the five marks allocated to the IClicker was fair and 26% said it was too few.
• 77% said they had a positive experience with the IClickers, 14% were neutral, and 9% said they had a negative experience.
— Results from one section of Chemistry 1300.
