I am an admitted tech geek.  Often a first adopter of new tech for the classroom, I love to experiment with the tech that our students use so comfortably.  These experiments aren't always successful though.  

I use clickers in my general chemistry classes and have also tried them in some of my moderately large upper level classes.  In gen chem, I have a three minute clicker quiz at the beginning of each lecture.  That quiz is always a single multiple choice style question based on the material from the previous  lecture.  I know some teachers like to use clickers to enforce reading assignments in the text, but I think it is important for my students to go home after each lecture, and "practice what I preach."  Therefore, I give them a clicker question that echoes the work we did last in class, to confirm that they picked it up or to clue me in if I need to clarify something.  Added benefts are that students get to practice Multiple choice questions of the same type that they will see on their hourly exams and they get a sense for how much time they should spend on a single multiple choce question.  (There's a lot of literature to back up the 3-minute window, but that will have to wait for a future blog.)

I also use clickers for exams, in place of scantrons.  Students get an exam booklet, just as they always have done, but they are required to enter their answers in the clicker during a self-paced testing session.  A window for answers is opened (e.g., 90 minutes), and students may answer questions in any order they choose during this window.  

This has been an intersting journey.  Exams are considered "high stakes" assignments, and there's a lot of literature that discourages the introducition of new technology to these high stakes assignments.  I offer that since my students use clickers each day, this is not new technology, but it is different technology. 

Before the first exam using clickers, I gave a mini- in class exercise with five questions in 15 minutes, so that students would get an opportunity to practice in the self-paced mode while being able to ask for help.  I also REQUIRE that students record their answers on paper, as backup, for cases in which something goes awry with the technology. By the way, this has never happend, but it has happend that students hit the wrong buttons, or programmed the wrong ID, etc.  

What are the advantages to this?

• I get good assessment data
• I get ease of scoring
• I don't have to interpret chicken scratch
• Students get fast scoring of the 80% of the exam that is multiple choice.
• Students get more use out of the clickers I required them to purchase (and which they use in other courses)

Disadvantages?

• About 10% of the students do have technology phobias, at least in the exam setting. I quietly allow these students to not use the clicker
• My students all have to be in the same room when they take the exam.  With 200 students this term, that limits me to one room on our campus for testing.

I think this is a win, and I plan to continue, but what do you think about this application?