The Knight Study: Clicker Questions and Peer Discussion

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00:00:13.11 When I started using clickers,
00:00:15.20 it was about the same time that the National Academies Summer Institute
00:00:19.11 was beginning,
00:00:21.11 and Jenny Knight, who I have taught with for many years,
00:00:24.24 and I realized that we were not applying most of the principles in that...
00:00:30.09 the first time we had the Summer Institute,
00:00:32.11 we all talked about active learning
00:00:34.04 and how to do it.
00:00:36.06 And we decided to try an experiment the following year.
00:00:39.09 So, we developed a little assessment
00:00:42.13 that we thought was a reasonable test
00:00:45.12 of how well students understood the concepts
00:00:47.13 in the developmental biology course
00:00:49.13 that we were co-teaching.
00:00:51.06 And we gave it first to a...
00:00:52.29 to a set of students who took the traditional class
00:00:55.11 that we had been doing for several years.
00:00:58.28 And we measured the learning gains
00:01:01.03 by doing a pre-test and a post-test.
00:01:03.13 And then, for the two subsequent semesters,
00:01:05.16 we taught the course using clickers,
00:01:09.02 which had just sort of appeared on the scene,
00:01:12.01 and doing some think-pair-share things in class.
00:01:16.17 And we simply substituted about 20 minutes of each 75-minute class period
00:01:20.19 with active learning exercises,
00:01:22.15 many of them clicker questions.
00:01:35.10 So, I'll show you what the data looked like for this experiment
00:01:38.09 and see what you make of it.
00:01:42.18 The blue shows the distribution of learning gains among students.
00:01:48.05 And these are normalized so that we can compare students
00:01:50.21 who started with a lot of knowledge
00:01:53.03 to those who didn't have so much at the beginning.
00:01:56.14 The red and the yellow represent the distributions
00:01:59.03 from the two subsequent semesters,
00:02:01.06 where we were doing about a third of the class as active learning time.
00:02:06.23 What would you conclude from this?
00:02:17.06 And as you can see, the distribution shifts about
00:02:20.29 30 percent to... toward higher scores.
00:02:25.18 So, what we concluded from this data
00:02:28.01 was that even introducing a small...
00:02:30.07 a relatively small amount of active learning
00:02:32.14 into what had been a traditional lecture
00:02:34.28 resulted in a significant increase in the learning gains.

This Talk

Audience:

Educators of H. School / Intro Undergrad
Educators of Adv. Undergrad / Grad
Educators

Recorded: July 2014

Talk Overview

Do students learn more with clickers and peer-discussion?

Bill Wood (University of Colorado, Boulder) describes the Knight et al. study, which looks at student learning gains in an active learning classroom that utilizes clicker questions and peer-discussion, similar to a think-pair-share.

Educators featured in this video: Jenny Knight and Bill Wood, University of Colorado Boulder.

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