What are Middle School Students Talking About During Clicker Questions? Characterizing Small-Group Conversations Mediated by Classroom Response Systems

Abstract

There is a growing interest in using classroom response systems or clickers in science classrooms at both the university and K-12 levels. Typically, when instructors use this technology, students are asked to answer and discuss clicker questions with their peers. The existing literature on using clickers at the K-12 level has largely focused on the efficacy of clicker implementation, with few studies investigating collaboration and discourse among students. To expand on this work, we investigated the question: Does clicker use promote productive peer discussion among middle school science students? Specifically, we collected data from middle school students in a physical science course. Students were asked to answer a clicker question individually, discuss the question with their peers, answer the same question again, and then subsequently answer a new matched-pair question individually. We audio recorded the peer conversations to characterize the nature of the student discourse. To analyze these conversations, we used a grounded analysis approach and drew on literature about collaborative knowledge co-construction. The analysis of the conversations revealed that middle school students talked about science content and collaboratively discussed ideas. Furthermore, the majority of conversations, both ones that positively and negatively impacted student performance, contained evidence of collaborative knowledge co-construction.

A Campus-Wide Investigation of Clicker Implementation: The Status of Peer Discussion in STEM Classes

“…, 2011 ; Knight et al. , 2015 ; Barth-Cohen et al. , 2016 ), the observed variation in use of the peer discussion portion of clicker implementation is consistent with findings for other research-based pedagogies, which are typically changed and modified during implementation by faculty ( Henderson and Dancy, 2007 ; NRC, 2013 ).…”

“…, 2011 ; Knight et al. , 2015 ; Barth-Cohen et al. , 2016 ) and that peer discussion produces higher performance outcomes when compared with other tasks such as quiet reflection ( Lasry et al.…”

Effectiveness of clicker‐assisted teaching in improving the critical thinking of adolescent learners

“…Similar to the case of the literature on the use of clickers at the collegiate level, most of the reported studies on the usage of clickers by pre-high school students have focused on the logistics of their implementations. Besides surveying the attitude of educators and/or students towards clickers in the classroom (Kay & Knaack, 2009;Shirley & Irving, 2015), such studies focus for instance on challenges in their implementation (Kay & Knaack, 2009;Lee, Feldman, & Beatty, 2012) and changes in the behaviour of students and peer-peer/educator interactions (Barth-Cohen et al, 2016;Horne, 2015;Szwed & Bouck, 2013). For these young students, when clickers were employed in order to increase the performance on a subject or to improve the learning outcome, the reported results range from success (Jacobs, 2013); subject-dependent mixed results (Bonaiuti, Calvani, & Piazza, 2015); or no effect at all (Arner, 2010;Encarnacion, 2014).…”

Analýza problémově orientovaných výukových situací ve výuce přírodovědy

“…Pozornost by měla být věnována konkrétním analýzám kvality dialogů a povaze interakcí, které se odehrávají ve vý-uce (srov. Tůma, 2013, s. 15;Barth-Cohen et al, 2016). Výukové situace mohou mít očekávaný, někdy i standardizovaný průběh (podléhají typizacím), ale mohou také obsahovat nejrůznější zlomy, radikální obraty, zásadní významová přehodnocení apod.…”