What are Middle School Students Talking About During Clicker Questions? Characterizing Small-Group Conversations Mediated by Classroom Response Systems

Lauren A. Barth-Cohen,Daniel K. Capps,Michelle K. Smith,Justin D. Lewin,MacKenzie R. Stetzer,Jonathan T. Shemwell

doi:10.1007/s10956-015-9576-2

Abstract

There is a growing interest in using classroom response systems or clickers in science classrooms at both the university and K-12 levels. Typically, when instructors use this technology, students are asked to answer and discuss clicker questions with their peers. The existing literature on using clickers at the K-12 level has largely focused on the efficacy of clicker implementation, with few studies investigating collaboration and discourse among students. To expand on this work, we investigated the question: Does clicker use promote productive peer discussion among middle school science students? Specifically, we collected data from middle school students in a physical science course. Students were asked to answer a clicker question individually, discuss the question with their peers, answer the same question again, and then subsequently answer a new matched-pair question individually. We audio recorded the peer conversations to characterize the nature of the student discourse. To analyze these conversations, we used a grounded analysis approach and drew on literature about collaborative knowledge co-construction. The analysis of the conversations revealed that middle school students talked about science content and collaboratively discussed ideas. Furthermore, the majority of conversations, both ones that positively and negatively impacted student performance, contained evidence of collaborative knowledge co-construction.

Highlights

Clickers are a type of instructional technology that allows instructors to gauge students’ real-time performance in the classroom
We found that middle school students improve their performance on clicker questions when they engage in peer discussion (Fig. 2)
Given that these students had no clear incentives for participation and were new to this type of peer instruction, our results suggest that there is considerable potential for productive clicker use in the middle school environment

Summary

Introduction

Clickers are a type of instructional technology that allows instructors to gauge students’ real-time performance in the classroom. Instructors pose conceptual questions in multiple-choice format at several points in the class period and students respond to the question or vote on the answers using clickers. Clicker questions are thought to support learning because they break up periods of lecture into smaller chunks, provide students with opportunities to practice solving problems and monitor their understanding during class, and can serve as a formative assessment tool for instructors. In one commonly used mode known as peer instruction, students answer a question individually, discuss the question with their peers, and answer the question a second time (Mazur 1997). The instructor leads a class discussion eliciting answer choices and asking students to justify their chosen responses without revealing which choices are correct. The instructor explains the question and often shows a histogram of all student responses, which gives both instructor and student immediate feedback on how well a concept is understood

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