The Impact of Clickers on Your Classroom and Your Career

Student response units or clickers enhance student learning by providing immediate feedback to both students and the instructor. This feedback can be an extremely valuable resource for teaching. In addition clickers increase student engagement with all the material within a class. Not surprisingly, every year there is more quantitative evidence of the value of clickers and richer descriptions of how clickers can be used. This presentation adds to that evidence and those descriptions, but the paper's focus is a broader perspective. First, the paper discusses how and why clickers can qualitatively change the classroom. Second, how the change can positively impact an academic's career including the promotion and tenure process. These points are supported with anecdotal evidence gathered by professors with a range of clicker experience from first usage in a course to 25 years of use in a variety of classes. Much of our past work has been in the context of quantitative courses. Clicker use was recently expanded to qualitative courses with very similar results. While some of the details are somewhat different between the two types of courses, student support remained very strong. Finally, we suggest that one of the best reasons to use clickers is that they can make teaching a lot more fun. Instead of focusing on covering a chapter's worth of material, it is possible to focus on maximizing what students learn in the classroom and the course.