Adapting Clicker Technology to Diversity Courses: New Research Insights

Abstract

Diversity courses present many challenges to instructors, but foremost among these is student resentment of the material and theoretical approaches. Clickers exhibit several features making them potentially useful in diversity courses. Specifically, clickers provide opportunities for students to anonymously register their opinions on contentious social issues (“opinion polling”) as well as their difficulty with course material (“content polling”). While existing literature documents the value of clickers for content polling, there is little research on opinion polling and none on their use in diversity courses. This comparative case study is an exploratory investigation of the value of clicker use in two political science diversity courses. Student and instructor perspectives were gathered using several approaches, including an open-ended feedback form, a questionnaire, TA-instructor interviews, and a database of clicker polls. Findings support the value to student learning of both opinion and content polling. Also supported is clicker use to empower shy students, to encourage class attendance, and to help adapt lectures to student needs. Clickers contributed to an open classroom climate (an important feature in diversity courses), but their impact depends on an instructor's pedagogical approach. Of particular interest, the anonymity feature of clickers elicited considerable debate among students and the instructors.

Keywords:

• clickers
• gender diversity
• opinion polling
• student-response systems

Acknowledgments

Previous versions of this study were presented at the 2009 Southwestern Political Science Association Meeting and the 2010 American Political Science Association Meeting. We appreciate the feedback of panel discussants and the three anonymous reviewers. Dan Levin also provided essential feedback that helped to reconceptualize the crafting of the article.

Notes

Note: The percentage is calculated out of 99 students. Students gave multiple responses so the total exceeds 100%.

Clickers are individually identified, handheld devices that students use in class to respond to instructor-posed questions. Clicker literature can be found under a number of keywords: electronic voting systems, personal response systems, audience response systems, group response systems, group decision support systems, classroom communication systems, classroom response systems, student response systems, wireless keypads, and clickers. We used clickers made by Turning Technologies LLC.

Turning Technologies clickers allow two forms of anonymity: (a) anonymous to the student's peers but not to the professor—essential to using clickers for participation credit and (b) anonymous to the student's peers and to the professor. The second option may be appropriate for particularly sensitive questions, but another possibility is to have a “prefer not to answer” option.

Over the past 20 years, colleges and universities across the nation have developed “diversity” curricula to promote cross-cultural understanding and a more widespread respect for differences of race, class, and gender (Colby et al. 2003, 138). More than 60% of U.S. colleges and universities require students to take a diversity course.

Both Political Science sections were cross-listed with the Gender Studies program allowing up to 20 students to enroll under that designation. In Schwartz-Shea's section there were 14 gender studies students of the 54 enrolled; Holland had 19 gender studies students of the 72 enrolled.

The number of Political Science majors in Schwartz-Shea's and Holland's sections was 52.6% and 63.9%, respectively. These numbers come from responses to our assessment questionnaire (see “Methods” section).

In response to questions about the diversity mandate in our assessment questionnaire (see “Methods” section), 59% of students in Schwartz-Shea's and 52.5% in Holland's course indicated that the topic matter did not interest them; almost 13% (Schwartz-Shea) and 16.4% (Holland) described themselves as angry or apprehensive about taking the course; and 20.5% (Schwartz-Shea) and 6.6% (Holland) described their opinion of the university's diversity requirement as “unnecessary” or “stupid.”

“A teachable moment is an unplanned opportunity that arises in the classroom where a teacher has an ideal chance to offer insight to his or her students. A teachable moment is not something that you can plan for; rather, it is a fleeting opportunity that must be sensed and seized by the teacher. Often it will require a brief digression that temporarily sidetracks the original lesson plan so that the teacher can explain a concept that has inadvertently captured the students' collective interest.” (Lewis n.d.)

Jennifer Yim was awarded the prestigious University Teaching Assistantship (UTA) for her innovative teaching design that provided partial funding for this study.

Additionally, because the courses were taught in subsequent semesters of the same academic year, teaching assistant Yim was more experienced with the clicker system by the time she assisted with Holland's course during the spring term.

The syllabi can be obtained by e-mailing the authors.

Students also disliked the pacing and multiple-choice aspects of clicker test questions. For reasons of space, we do not report our questionnaire results on the use of clickers for testing; the results replicate existing literature on this use.

“Right to privacy” has been replaced with “liberty interest” in recent legal constitutional analysis.