Diane Bunce displays the wireless "clicker" devices she uses to encourage student participation in two of her classes.

Associate Professor Diane Bunce makes chemistry click — in more ways than one. Students in her two introductory chemistry classes last semester used wireless handheld devices called clickers to register their attendance and answer questions in class.

While several dozen students gathered in a lecture room wielding TV-remote-type gadgets might call to mind a large family room on a boring cable night, there’s a lot of learning — and learning theory — at work here. In fact, clickers are being touted by those who use them as a way to encourage class participation, enhance comprehension and provide immediate feedback.

“It’s a way to erode the great gulf that can exist in lectures between the teacher and the student,” Bunce says.

The clickers use infrared rays to communicate with a hub that registers each click on Bunce’s computer. (Some clickers use a radio frequency to communicate.) Students “click in” at the beginning of class to register their attendance and click again to answer each of the three to four questions Bunce asks during the 50-minute lecture.

Clickers have several advantages: Students answer the multiple-choice questions anonymously and without fear of failure. Their answers give Bunce immediate feedback. If students don’t understand the concept, she explains it again. And clickers keep students alert. “The clickers were definitely a fun learning tool, and they really got us involved,” says School of Nursing sophomore Julia Ruane, who used a clicker in her Chemistry for the Health Sciences class last spring.

One company that manufactures clickers says that more than 700 colleges use the clicker technology, according to a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Bunce’s experience is that they are still far from common, however. “At a recent symposium held at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, lots of professors reported using clickers. But when we went back to our home campuses we were still the only ones using them in our departments,” she says.
 
That may be changing, however, at least at CUA. Last spring, members of the university’s Academic Senate recorded their votes via clickers (Bunce was vice chair and pushed for that change) and this gave every dean and department chair a chance to use the new technology. Bunce also gave a presentation on clickers at a meeting of the e-learning council of the 11 Washington consortium universities.

Bunce isn’t the only fan of the wireless devices at CUA. “We think the clickers will take off,” says William Lantry, director of academic services at CUA’s Center for Planning and Information Technology. To meet the expected demand, CPIT has bought a set of 50 clickers professors can use in their classes.

Bunce is convinced that the clickers create a better learning experience. “The brain is hard-wired so that there is just a limited amount of short-term memory,” she explains. “Our attention wanes after 12 minutes.” By asking students to click answers to three or four questions per hour, roughly once every 12 minutes, Bunce says she breaks up the lecture, resets students’ short-term memories and makes it easier for them to retain information.

During a recent lecture, for example, Bunce asked students to choose one of four multiple-choice answers to the question, “How do DNA probes help in the diagnosis of disease?” After students briefly considered the question (which they sometimes do alone and sometimes with other students) they selected their answers by pushing the corresponding letter button on their clickers. The large screen in front of class displayed how many students chose each answer, and Bunce talked about each choice.

“This helped us learn why an answer is right or wrong instead of just what the answer is,” Ruane says. Which is exactly what Bunce wants.

Stephen Bradforth, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California, helped launch a trial of the clickers and found they increased class participation and improved attendance, according to an article on the BusinessWeek.com Web site.