Clickenomics: Using a Classroom Response System to Increase Student Engagement in a Large-Enrollment Principles of Economics Course

Abstract

One of the most important challenges facing college instructors of economics is helping students engage. Engagement is particularly important in a large-enrollment Principles of Economics course, where it can help students achieve a long-lived understanding of how economists use basic economic ideas to look at the world. The author reports how instructors can use Classroom Response Systems (clickers) to promote engagement in the Principles course. He draws heavily on his own experience in teaching a one semester Principles course at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but also reports on how others have used clickers to promote engagement. He concludes with evidence that students find clickers very beneficial and with an assessment of the costs and benefits of adopting a clicker system.

Keywords:

• classroom response system
• clickers
• interactive teaching
• student engagement

JEL code:

• A22

Michael K. Salemi is a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (e-mail: [email protected]). He thanks W. Lee Hansen, Mark Maier, KimMarie McGoldrick, and Michael Watts. He thanks seminar participants at the Stavros Center, the University of Memphis, and the Teaching Innovations Program for helpful comments on presentations that gave rise to this article. He also thanks his teaching assistants: Natta Akapaiboon, Basak Altan, Emanuel Bello, Gwen Clark, Michael Darden, Seth Glazer, Zhicheng Guo, Philip Jackson, David Jones, Zongqiang Liao, Rebecca Martin, Portia Obeng, Teresa Perez, Lauren Raymer, Sarah Simon, and Nat Tharnpanich.

Notes

1. Interested readers can view my syllabus, PowerPoint slides, and clicker exercises at www.unc.edu/~salemi/Econ101.html.

2. Classroom response systems are an educational adaptation of audience response systems. Firms use audience response systems to conduct sales meetings, hold focus groups, test new products, and conduct planning and team building sessions. Previous generations of classroom response systems used infrared technology, which is generally regarded as inferior to the radio technology currently available. I use the Classroom Performance System offered by eInstruction. Other examples of classroom response systems are the Turning Point system offered by Turning Technologies, the H-ITT System offered by Hyper-Interactive Teaching Technology, and PRS Interwrite, which has recently merged with eInstruction. The Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University publishes a particularly informative on-line guide to classroom response systems (Bruff 2008).

3. I learned this strategy from Robert Reinke.

4. In a small enrollment section, instructors can take attendance manually at small cost. In large-enrollment sections, the cost of manual attendance taking is huge.

5. At UNC-CH, the add period for classes lasts only one week, and I declined to extend it. Counting only the top 90 percent of each student's responses allowed me to resist becoming involved in occasional response-pad problems or excused absences. I told students at the beginning of the course that they had 10 percent “grace” and should use it carefully. Nevertheless, as I show in the next section, students overwhelmingly approved of the use of clickers in the course.

6. Econ 101 at UNC-CH requires students to attend two 75-minute lectures and one 50-minute recitation per week. Recitations are supervised by graduate teaching assistants. Each recitation section includes about 30 students. I based grades in my Principles course on a student's total score of 100 possible points: 25 for each of two midterm exams, 30 for the final exam, and 10 each for recitation and CRS assessments. The recitation grade was based on two quizzes, a journal in which students explained how economics applied to several news articles, and a component that measured how often and well students contributed to discussion in their recitation sections. The course grade distribution was A (13 percent), B (51 percent), C (26 percent), D (8 percent) and F (2 percent).

7. Because I target my Principles course to improve the economic literacy of students, I devote four lectures to opportunity cost, the benefit cost principle, and comparative advantage. A copy of my syllabus is available on my course Web page.

8. The eInstruction CRS system allows students to enter floating point number responses.

9. I have used sealed bid auctions for many years in small enrollment courses to good effect. It is only via clickers that I have been able to use auctions in large-enrollment courses.

10. I award the shirt to the winning bidder immediately at the conclusion of the auction. I accept the bidders promise to pay at the beginning of the next class if necessary. I always insist on payment for the shirt and make a show of receiving that payment. It is essential that everyone understands that the transaction is real.

11. In an honors section of Principles or in an intermediate microeconomics course, I would give the data to the students and ask them to find the profit-maximizing price and quantity. I judged that such an exercise was outside the curriculum for my literacy-targeted course.

12. In my own class, I have yet to implement PI but intend to do so when I next teach the course. I intend to assess the value added of peer instruction concept tests in a course that routinely asks graded “Are you with me?” questions.

13. Calhoun and Barber (2007) studied the impact on final course grade of using different clicker-based instructional strategies. In their study, both control and experimental groups used clickers. In the control group, students answered standard (Are you with me?) multiple choice questions. In the experimental group, students answered standard questions, diagnostic questions in which students assess their knowledge of a content area, and “think-pair-share” questions in which students engage in PI. They found that a significant positive effect of participation in the experimental section. They also found that students who did better in clicker assessments did better in other graded work.

14. Absences were concentrated among a few students. The median number of classes attended was 25 of 26, and 83 percent of students were present at 23 classes or more. Only 8 percent of students were marked present at fewer than 20 classes. As remarkably good as these attendance data are, they slightly understate true attendance because students who forgot their clickers or had a clicker malfunction were not marked present by the CRS.

15. It could be argued that the enthusiasm observed by my teaching assistants is because of the questions themselves rather than the use of clickers. I disagree. I have been asking provocative questions for years but detected an increase in enthusiasm only when I began using clickers. It could also be argued that I have been blessed with extraordinary teaching assistants. But the teaching assistants themselves reported that students were more energetic in their recitations for my course than they were in recitation sections of other courses.

16. If the classroom projector is driven by a classroom CPU, it will be necessary for the instructor to install the CRS software on the classroom computer. Because the software will keep the grade book for the course on the computer where the software is installed, it will be essential for the instructor to password protect the CRS files and to download backup copies of the grade book via a flash drive.

17. Sosin et al. (2004) found that the use of PowerPoint presentations is negatively correlated with learning as measured by the Test of Understanding in College Economics but made no allowance for how PowerPoint is used. It may be that the use of PowerPoint is positively correlated with a “stand-and-deliver” approach to teaching. If that is so, one might expect that using clickers in conjunction with PowerPoint would reverse the negative correlation finding. None of the educational literature attributes the learning benefits of clickers to the fact that use of clickers is frequently combined with the use of PowerPoint and it bears repeating that one can use clickers independently of PowerPoint.