Taking clickers to the next level: a contingent teaching model

Abstract

Over the past decade, many researchers have discussed the effectiveness of clickers and their potential to change the way we teach and interact with students. Although most of the literature revolves around elementary usage of clickers, the deeper questions of how to integrate this technology into teaching are largely unanswered. In this paper, we present an implementation of a teaching model in a third year undergraduate Bayesian statistics class. The model is based on Schoenfeld's interactive teaching routine and it is enhanced by Draper and Brown's contingent teaching and Beatty et al.'s Question Driven Instruction (QDI) and the use of clickers. It illustrates a teaching paradigm which is flexible, contingent to students’ needs, makes use of the most up to date information from students’ feedback via clickers and benefits from the teacher's decision making at appropriate moments. We will discuss the pedagogical implications of this model in teaching.

Keywords:

• classroom response systems
• clickers
• contingent teaching
• decision making
• audience response systems
• Question Driven Instruction (QDI)