• Clickers Home
• Devices and Setup
• In Practice
  • Are Clickers Right for Your Course?
  • Teaching Ideas
  • Tips for Use
  • Designing Questions for Clickers
• Additional Resources
• About the Project

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Tips for Clicker Use

Below are tips for using clickers to foster active learning experiences in large lecture courses. (This information is adapted from "Twelve Tips for Using a Computerized Interactive Audience Response System" (Robertson, 2000) and "Tips for Using a Peer Response System in a Large Introductory Physics Class" (Milner-Bolotin, 2004).)

• Provide clear instruction to the class.
  Make sure everyone understands the process and how to use the technology. This may require extra time for the first couple uses. Be sure to allow time for instructions when planning your lesson.

• Encourage active discussion with students.
  Try posting the question and asking students to discuss their answers with each other before collecting answers. When most students have come up with an answer, enable voting. Before revealing the correct answer, discuss the answer options and allow students explain their reasons for choosing various answers. Be sure to allow time for discussion when planning your lesson.

• Test everything ahead of time.
  Check out the classroom location in order to identify any potential technical problems. Allow plenty time to set up and test the system before class. Rehearse the question presentation to ensure that it will run smoothly.

• Do not make questions overly complex.
  Keep questions short to optimize legibility in a slide, and offer no more than five answer options. Also, avoid requiring lots of complex calculations that may encourage students to guess rather than thinking through the question.

• Do not over use the system.
  Ask questions sparingly to highlight the concepts you most want to emphasize. Think carefully about the main points of a lecture and create questions to target them. (See Designing Questions for Clickers.)

Clicker Challenges

Below are some challenges of clicker user and advice on how to work through them. (See Articles for cited sources.)

• Creating successful questions can be challenging.¹⁷
  Writing thought-provoking questions with fixed answers can be difficult. See Designing Questions for Clickers for examples and advice.

• Using clickers takes more class time.¹⁷
  Successful clicker exercises encourage thoughtful responses and active participation from the class and can take more class time than traditional lectures. Remember this advice from Milner-Bolotin: "Do not feel disappointed if you spent too much time on one question and did not cover all the material. If you actively involved students in the lecture, helping them understand rather than memorize the material, you did your job!"

• Effective use requires good timing – not too slow, not too fast!⁴
  Pacing is very important -- give enough time for students to consider a question and enough time to discuss any questions that arise. Using clickers well may take practice for both the instructor and the class.

• Technical problems can occur.⁴
  Test everything ahead of time, but be prepared to improvise if a technical problem occurs.