Incorporating the advantages of clickers and mobile devices to teach Economics to non-economists

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, teaching practitioners in higher education (HE) have found themselves confronted with more challenges to help students engage in learning. Particularly, one of the main problems with the traditional lecture format to teach non-economists economics is that students tend to lack interest in the subject and therefore have a low level of engagement. Student response systems (i.e. “clickers”) have been used in classes for about 20 years and become more popular on many college campuses. Many studies reveal that clicker technology offers great promise in increasing students’ participation and engagement in lectures. Meanwhile, thanks to fast development of mobile technology, personal mobile devices can be integrated with clicker systems into teaching and learning with improved features. The programme we used and found as a very useful interactive teaching tool for learning is called Kahoot!. This paper offers a brief guidance on how to use Kahoot! to encourage active learning and engage non-economics majors in learning economics. Meanwhile, the existing relevant literature with regard to the use of clickers in HE is highlighted. In addition, the effectiveness of using Kahoot! in teaching economics to non-economists is evaluated by a student survey.

Keywords:

• clickers
• student response system (SRS)
• mobile technology
• economics teaching
• student engagement
• active learning
• economic tools for teaching

Public Interest Statement

As lecturers of economics in higher education (HE), we always find it challenging to teach economics modules to the students who are not majoring in economics. The major problem can be that students are not interested in the subject. Therefore, it is important to find an effective way to engage them.

In the past years, student response systems (i.e. “clickers”) have been used in HE to increase student engagement, which is a form of technology that offers lecturers the opportunity to pose multiple-choice questions to the class at the front and then students can submit answers with small hand-held devices.

This paper introduces a web-based clicker called “Kahoot!” that can be played using students’ personal devices like mobile phones or tablets and evaluates the effectiveness of using this technology in economics teaching to non-economists by a student survey.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Deena Webster for introducing Kahoot! to us and the Department of Land, Farm and Agribusiness Management at Harper Adams University for being supportive to this research. Also, thanks to Dr Lydia Arnold for helpful discussion and assistance.

Notes

1. There are many other names for clickers like classroom response system (CRS), personal response system (PRS), audience response system (ARS), electronic voting system (EVS) and so on.

2. The first SRS can be traced back to 1950 when the US Air Force used it to train personnel (Kendrick, 2010).

3. Other problems may also arise, e.g. losing or forgetting to bring in the device so that students cannot participate, or the devices do not function properly (i.e. low battery), etc.

4. Kahoot! app can also be downloaded for any device with Android system for easy and frequent use.

5. Since mobile phones have become an indispensable part of their daily life for most students, they are less likely to forget taking the phones with them or charging the phones.

6. Note that this is different from the address that lecturers visit.

7. Students do not need to create their own accounts to play the Kahoot!, which adds more to its easy use.

8. In our classes, we asked the students to use their student ID numbers as nicknames so that we were able to track the record of each individual student after class, but at the same time maintained anonymity as students could not recognize each other’s ID number.

9. The scoreboard shows the top-five students with the highest points.

10. Further details about the survey and questionnaire results are available from the authors on request.

Additional information

Funding

Funding. The authors received no direct funding for this research.

Notes on contributors

Hairong Mu

Hairong Mu is a lecturer in Economics and Business Enterprise at Harper Adams University. Her research interests are in microeconomics, in general, and industrial organization as well as regulation and competition laws, in particular. She has gained extensive experience in economics teaching from previous jobs as a teaching assistant at the University of Southampton and postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of York.

Dimitrios Paparas

Dimitrios Paparas is a lecturer in Economics and Business Enterprise at Harper Adams University. Before joining Harper, he taught various economics modules at Kingston University and the University of East London as a lecturer in economics. His research interests fall in macroeconomics, applied econometrics and fiscal policy.

The research reported in this paper provides a practical guidance on use of mobile clickers, i.e. Kahoot!, which can initiate a further discussion on how to teach and engage non-economics majors in learning economics.