Peer instruction using clickers has been popularized by Professor Eric Mazur at Harvard University and is a strategy which aims to help students develop productive ideas about the material they are studying by discussing conceptual questions with peers during class and answering multiple-choice questions about these concepts posed by instructor.
During class, the instructor briefly lectures (5-10 minutes) about a particular concept or idea. Then, he poses several conceptual questions regarding that concept in the form of multiple-choice question. For each question, students first answer it individually (via a classroom response system which could be an electronic clicker or a card with A, B, C, D or E to denote their choice for the multiple-choice question), then they discuss their answer with a peer, after which they answer it again.
The essential aspects of this method which help improve student learning are the following:
- It is a great formative assessment tool which communicates the goals of the course to students in the form of concrete questions so that students have a good idea about the level of understanding that is desired pertaining to a particular topic.
- The feedback that the instructor obtains from students’ responses can be used to adjust the instruction and focus on issues that most students find difficult. The feedback can also be helpful in tracking the progress of students individually and of the class as a whole.
- The conceptual questions are designed to uncover a typical unproductive way in which many students reason about the concept (i.e., the alternative choices deal with common difficulties, a misconception or alternate conception).
- These unproductive ways in which students reason about the material are often revealed by discipline-based research, or from experience teaching and listening to or reading students’ reasoning in homework or exams.
- Being able to come up with plausible incorrect answers that students may select if they do not know the correct answer is important: the most effective clicker questions are the ones in which the level of difficulty is such that roughly half the class selects the correct answer, and the rest gravitates towards one or two incorrect answers.
- The questions should NOT be too easy! (e.g., 80% of students answer correctly).
- Students may be misled about the difficulty of questions they should expect on an exam.
- Students overwhelmingly see challenging questions as most useful for their learning.
- The questions should NOT be too easy! (e.g., 80% of students answer correctly).
- The peer interaction aspect (discussion between two or even three students sitting next to each other in class) is essential because:
- Students have to articulate their ideas to their peers and the process of articulating their thoughts helps them solidify their ideas. Therefore, this method helps all students including those who may have to do explaining to their peers.
- Peer discussions tend to lead to the correct answer most of the time (i.e., students with correct answers are more likely to convince students with incorrect answers than vice-versa; furthermore, two students with incorrect answers can discuss with each other and end up with the correct answer – in physics this has been shown to occur in roughly 1/3 of the cases, see this article).
- Discussing several questions each class breaks the monotony of lecture. Students become intellectually engaged because they must discuss the material with their peers. They are more attentive during class and tend to value class time as an important learning experience. Most students also enjoy working with peers.
This method is highly versatile and can be incorporated in various instructional settings fairly easily (including large enrollment classes) without requiring significant changes (either in terms of instruction or class architecture).
For more information, see "An Instructor's guide to the effective use of personal response systems ("clickers") in teaching".
Books on using the Peer Instruction method are available for:
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Additional Resources
- Clicker resource guide at University of British Columbia (Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative)
- Web resources at Carleton College for clickers
- Guide to using Classroom Response Systems (“Clickers”) at Vanderbilt University - Center for Teaching
- Extensive Bibliography on clicker use and research at Vanderbilt Center for Teaching
Free Clicker questions (referred to as ConcepTests, GoodQuestions etc.)
- Physics
- Universityof Maryland Peer Instruction Questions for Physics 1 and 2
- University of Maryland Clicker Questions for Physics for Biologists 1
- Concept Questions for physics using PhET simulations at University of Colorado Boulder
- ConceptTests for upper level quantum mechanics:QuILT Beta website
- You will need to request permission which you will be granted after a short verification period (a day or two) which ensures that you are an instructor.
- The website also includes research-based tutorials for teaching quantum mechanics in addition to ConceptTests
- Astronomy
- Chemistry
- Collection of ConceptTests for Chemistry (General, Organic, Analytical, Inorganic, Physical, Biochemistry)
- ConceptTests for General Chemistry
- Biology
- Course materials for biology courses at University of Colorado Boulder (Science Education Initiative)
- Fundamentals of Human Genetics
- Intro to Molecular and Cellular Biology
- Principles of Genetics
- Molecular Biology
- Immunology
- Developmental Biology
- Molecular Neurobiology
- In addition to clicker questions, the courses often include other course materials such as activities, learning goals, homework etc.
- Course materials for biology courses at University of Colorado Boulder (Science Education Initiative)
- Mathematics
- Cornell university list of Concept Questions (called “GoodQuestions”) and WarmUp questions for a calculus course
- Detailed explanations for each question in addition to common student thinking patterns are also provided
- Mathematics concept question library from project MathQuest at Carroll University
- Includes questions for Calculus (single and multivariable), Statistics, Differential equations, Linear algebra, College Algebra, and more
- Also includes a list of publications related to use of classroom voting in mathematics
- Cornell university list of Concept Questions (called “GoodQuestions”) and WarmUp questions for a calculus course
- Statistics
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Faculty at the University of Oklahoma have developed statistics clicker questions on: Confidence Intervals and Hypothesis Testing, Correlation and Regression, Descriptive Statistics, General Concepts, Measurement, Probability Distributions and Sampling.
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Derek Bruff (Vanderbilt University) has developed statistics clicker questions. Click here for more information.
- Roxy Peck's collection of classroom voting questions for statistics is part of the sets of questions that accompany the texts: Statistics: The Exploration and Analysis of Data, Roxy Peck and Jay Devore, 6th edition, Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning 2008; Introduction to Statistics and Data Analysis, Roxy Peck, Chris Olsen and Jay Devore, 3rd Edition, Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning 2008.
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Computer Science
- Peer Instruction for Computer Science
- A comprehensive collection of peer instruction materials for
- CS Principles with Alice
- CS1 in MatLab, CS1 in Java, CS1 in Python
- Computer Architecture
- Theory of Computation
- Programming Languages
- Discrete Mathematics
- Operating Systems
- To access complete materials you just need to fill out a form with name, email, and organization/institution
- Geoscience
- Course Materials for Geology courses at University of Colorado Boulder (Science Education Initiative)
- Intro to Geology 1 and 2
- Intro to Geology Laboratory
- Environmental Geology
- Minerology
- Intro to Oceanography
- Critical thinking, rates and dates in earth
- In addition to clicker questions, the courses often include other course materials such as activities, learning goals, homework etc.
Articles on clicker question development, use and effectiveness of Peer Instruction/Clickers
- J. E. Caldwell, Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips, CBE – Life Science Education 6 (2007)
- I. D. Beatty, W. J. Gerace, W. J. Leonard, and R. J. Dufresne, Designing Effective Questions for Classroom Response System Teaching, American Journal of Physics 74(1), 31-39 (2006)
- N. Lasry, E. Mazur and J. Watkins, “Peer Instruction: From Harvard to the two-year college”, Am. J. Phys. 76, 1066-1069 (2008).
- A. P. Fagen, C. H. Crouch and E. Mazur, “Peer Instruction: Results from a Range of Classrooms”, Phys. Teach., 40, 206-209 (2002).
- C. L. McCreary, M. F. Golde, and R. Koeske, “Peer Instruction in the General Chemistry Laboratory: Assessment of Student Learning”, Journal of Chemical Education 83(5) (2006)
- K. Cline, M. Parker, H. Zullo, and A. Stewart, Addressing Common Student Errors with Classroom Voting in Multivariable Calculus, PRIMUS (Problems, Resources and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies) 23(1), 60-75, (2012)
- B. Simon, S. Esper, L. Porter, and Q. Cutts, Student experience in a student-centered peer instruction classroom, Proceedings of the ninth annual international ACM conference on International computing education research, 129-136 (2013)
- W. B. Wood, Clickers: A Teaching Gimmick that Works, Developmental Cell 7(6), 796-798 (2004)
- B. Morling, M. McAuliffe, L. Cohen, and T. M. DiLorenzo, Efficacy of Personal Response Systems (“Clickers”) in Large, Introductory Psychology Classes, Teaching of Psychology 35(1), 45-50 (2008)
- S. W. Draper and M. I. Brown, Increasing interactivity in lectures using an electronic voting system, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 20, 81-94 (2004)
- M. L. Epstein et al., Immediate feedback assessment technique promotes learning and corrects inaccurate first responses, The Psychological Record 52, 187-201 (2002)