First Ever Clickers Conference

I recently attended the Inaugural Conference on Classroom Response Systems, hosted by the Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Louisville.  I had a great time meeting people who I knew only by their research, and some of the sessions were very well done.

Tim Stelzer, research associate professor of physics at the University of Illinois and one of the founders of i>clicker, presented the morning keynote address.  His presentation was very engaging, featuring a nice blend of information and humor.

One point Stelzer made that stood out to me was that in the past, being highly educated was correlated strongly with remembering lots of facts.  This is still true today to some extent.  Consider Ken Jennings, the guy who won all those Jeopardy gameshows.  He’s considered highly intelligent, but not for higher-order thinking skills (problem solving, critical thinking, etc.), just for remembering lots of trivia.

Stelzer made the point that with all the information available to students via the Internet, factual recall doesn’t play the same role it used to play in learning.  The challenge now in higher education is to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills, and Stelzer feels that classroom response systems can facilitate pedagogies that help teachers meet that challenge.

Writing clicker questions that target higher-order thinking skills isn’t easy, but it’s important given the goals instructors usually have for student learning.  We’ll talk about this at our gradSTEP workshop on clickers.  Have you seen multiple-choice questions (asked via clickers or traditional exams) that effectively target higher-order thinking skills?

(For additional thoughts on Tim Stelzer’s presentation, as well as other aspects of the clickers conference, visit my blog on teaching with classroom response systems.)

–Derek Bruff