Do clickers work for students with poorer grades and in harder courses?

Abstract

We studied the impact of clickers, also known as electronic student response systems, on the performance of students on two undergraduate finance courses. Consistent with some of the recent literature, we found that clickers have very little impact on student performance, as measured by final course grades. Further, we found that clickers do not have a significant impact on course grades for students in relation to their designated performance ability (weak versus strong) or whether the course in question is less or more difficult. However, after simultaneously controlling for course difficulty and student aptitude, we found that clickers have a meaningfully positive impact on the performance of poorly performing students on more challenging quantitative courses. Our results suggest that the impact of clickers on student performance may depend on the type of student (academically weak, average or strong) and the type of course (average or difficult). This finding has particular implications for curriculum planners at the post-secondary level, although the findings may also have application at the secondary school level.

Keywords:

• Clickers
• course
• quantitative
• students
• undergraduate

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Economics and Finance Education, seminar participants at the 2015 Ryerson University Learning and Teaching Conference and the 2015 AABRI Savannah Conference.

Notes

1. Throughout this article, for brevity, we use the term ‘weaker students’ to refer to students demonstrating poor academic performance.

2. There is a small body of research that looks at clickers and their impact on student engagement and performance for disadvantaged or disabled students (Smith-Osborne 2014; Williamson Sprague and Dahl 2010). This research does not directly address the impact of clickers on weaker students and consequently we only mention it in passing.

3. While beyond the scope of this article, it is important to mention that many factors (internal and external, observable and non-observable) can affect or influence student performance. The use of clickers in the classroom can potentially be one of these factors. For example, clickers might be of particular benefit to those students who are performing poorly due to a lack of engagement during traditional lectures. Conversely, clickers might be of benefit to those students who are more generally academically and analytically challenged. While we were not able to collect these types of student-level data, future efforts might concentrate on pairing up clickers with particular sets of different student types.

4. Obtaining consent to participate in the study is a requirement of the university. All students were subject to the pedagogy and grading scheme in the section for which they registered, regardless of whether they provide consent. Only students who consent to participate are included in any of the analysis that follows. The research protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Board of the university. Please contact any of the authors of the article for more details regarding the research protocols.