Sorry for the late posting. I just experienced a frustrating technology meltdown and realized how important it is to back up the system whenever you can. If you haven’t done it, do it now.
I used ProQuest from the library to start a massive survey about the articles that are related to student participation and its assessment. Even though my original idea was to gain some insights for teachers’ assessment, the focus of students’ assessment in this article seems to me as important as that of the teachers. So, here you are…
Trees, A. R. & Jackson, M. H. (2007, March). The learning environment in clicker classrooms: student processes of learning and involvement in large university-level courses using student response systems. Learning, Media and Technology 32 (1), 21-40.
Online (In-Text) Abstract:
To explore what social and educational infrastructure is needed to support classroom use of student response systems (Roschelle et al., 2004), this study investigated the ways in which student characteristics and course design choices were related to students’ assessments of the contribution of clicker use to their learning and involvement in the classroom. Survey responses of over 1500 undergraduates enrolled in seven large enrollment ‘clicker courses’ offered by three university departments are analyzed. A number of factors contribute to students’ positive perception of clickers: a desire to be involved and engaged, a view that traditional lecture styles are not best, valuing of feedback, class standing, previous experience with lecture courses, anticipated course performance, and amount of clicker use in the classroom. These results underscore the importance of considering social and communication elements of the classroom when adopting student response technology.
Some Annotations:
Instead of viewing large classroom in higher education as an undesirable classroom management, the researchers force readers (educators) to admit the inevitableness of large classes. I ponder on this a lot. As an education research, should I critically think about improvement based on the status quo or to change the status quo? Is it impossible/difficult/inappropriate to change it? The article also recognizes the difficulties for both teachers’ engaging students and students’ involvement in class. Clickers, according to the article, is a very simple and effective tool to allow both teachers and students to have certain access to the interactivity of the courses. With little attempt to claim that Clickers or similar technology response systems are effective in engaging students fully, the data within show the potential of it. People might hold some doubts to its use of multiple choice questions as the measurement, but this seems to be a good starting point to involve more students in class engagement.