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For some time,
most of us have assumed that clickers' native place is the large
lecture, generally, and the STEM course, specifically.
After a few years of speculating about clickers
in humanities courses, I made them part of my English 241:
Introduction to the Novel this past fall. I am happy to report
that they seem to have helped me meet two objectives.
Making Arguments
This course requires significant reading and writing, and the latter
depends on the ability to fashion a thoughtful (and interesting)
thesis statement. I require regular one-page short response papers,
a three- to four-page paper, and an end-of-semester eight-page
paper. As I assigned the first substantial paper, it became clear
that many of my students were having difficulty articulating good
thesis statements. My response was to use clickers in the following
way.
I began class with a slide that outlined a few characteristics of
strong ("effective" is the description we used) thesis statements.
The next slide offered a sample thesis and asked students to
indicate with their clickers whether it was effective or ineffective
for the assignment. Students voted and, following Mazur's think,
pair, share model, discussed their choices with a neighboring peer
before voting a second time. Predictably, the second vote led to a
better aggregate response. We repeated this exercise with more
sample thesis statements. I then asked small groups to devise their
own thesis statements (with some guidelines; e.g., these statements
must address two of the works we had read to date). Those who have
taught writing or devoted course time to writing know that
collaborative writing can be a remarkably difficult task. I
acknowledged this with the class and observed that collaboratively
developing thesis statements fell a little outside of our work.
After groups had finished that exercise, I projected each thesis for
the class and repeated the first exercise of voting, discussing, and
voting again, this time allowing extemporaneous revision to thesis
statements in order to make them more effective (that was, after
all, the objective).
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My inclination is to see value in a few ways, here. First, thesis statements are--at
least in this situation--written. It was important that students
wrestled with a very specific claim arrested in written language and
projected on a screen, as opposed to the ephemera of class
discussion, in which remarks often lose their precision and are
forgotten
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"A pen-and-paper version of
this would have provided me with results, and a show-of-hands
discussion would have approximated the portrait of the class we
saw; however, using clickers founded a valuable reflective
discussion with quantifiable feedback, and it left me with a bit
of data that will certainly shape plans for my next course." |
moments after their utterance. Second, and
paradoxically, I wanted to be able to allow the group to edit these
statements, something we would be unable to do with handouts. Finally, as each vote
was cast, I was able to (very loosely and without studied care,
admittedly) assess the group's proficiency with thesis statements.
That last point persuades me that this is better than simply using
the chalkboard, though we took that approach in a later class.
Assessing the Course
My second use of clickers invited students to assess the course.
Because these clickers were not identified with individual students,
the feedback was anonymous. I used clickers because it seemed
important to structure a group evaluation exercise; when students
are told on the first day of class that the group is a temporary
intellectual community, it is critical to me that the last day of
class should acknowledge the group as such, even if only a gesture.
And so students were asked to answer questions about how much of
each novel had actually been read (these responses were occasionally
surprising and often disheartening), how many hours were spent
preparing for this class per week (too few), whether students
believed that
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they had achieved the course's learning outcomes
(simultaneously projected on-screen), whether students were applying
skills learned in this course to reading for other courses, and how
much reading students expected to do in the upcoming calendar year.
When asked whether the course was "intellectually challenging," 96%
responded that it was, and when asked how its intellectual challenge
compared to their other courses, 80% clicked that it was more
challenging - a rewarding figure, until we reflect on the fact that
80% of the group claimed to have spent between one and six hours
preparing for this class each week, and nearly 60% indicated that
they spent more time on this course than any other.
These are the roughest of numbers, collected
without much rigor, but they led to meaningful discussion as they
were collected. Our discussion of the fact that nearly 60% admitted
to not completing a novel about which each student was required to
write in her final paper was less than comfortable. It also contributed to my reading of those
papers.
The group was able to participate and observe a
real-time evaluation of the course, of peers' work, and of the
perceived sustainability of what had been learned. A pen-and-paper
version of this would have provided me with results, and a
show-of-hands discussion would have approximated the portrait of the
class we saw; however, using clickers founded a valuable reflective
discussion with quantifiable feedback, and it left me with a bit of
data that will certainly shape plans for my next course.
One more thing. It is noteworthy that my
implementation of clickers was limited. These two small projects (I
confess that a third attempt did not work because I was unprepared
for a technical problem) did not require students to purchase
clickers, and though their work on the thesis statement exercise
contributed to class participation grades, I did not attach any
grading mechanism via the clicker software. These were, in other
words, low-stakes (at least from the students' perspective; the
stakes were high for me during the course evaluation!).
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