Personal response systems, such as clickers, have been widely used to improve the effectiveness of teaching in various classroom settings. Although hand-held clicker response systems have been the subject of multiple prior studies, few studies have focused on the use of cell phone-based personal response system (CPPRS) specifically. This study…

The authors present the findings of a small-scale study of student opinions drawn from an anonymous and voluntary survey in an undergraduate science classroom. The survey questions focused on the use of basic tools in a college classroom. The tools included in the survey were PowerPoint, overhead projectors/chalkboards, personal response units,…

Blended learning has steadily gained in popularity at the higher levels of education. This marks a change in pedagogical approaches from one-directional instruction to an interactive and technology-aided class. However, to manage fluent in-class activities and proper data analysis, real-time and fine-grained data collection activities are still…

Lecturing is often criticized for being a monological and student passive way of teaching. However, digital technology such as Student Response Systems (SRS) can be used to reconstruct the traditional lecturing format. During a series of five two-hour lectures in "qualitative methods" for first year psychology students, we used SRS to…

This article describes an active learning strategy for engaging undergraduate business students, a group often ignored in scientific pedagogy, in learning about renewable energy technology and associated trade-offs. I designed a small-group activity to appeal to and engage business students, but the exercise could easily be used for a variety of…

In engaging lectures, also referred to as broken or interactive lectures, students are given short periods of lecture followed by "breaks" that can consist of 1-min papers, problem sets, brainstorming sessions, or open discussion. While many studies have shown positive effects when engaging lectures are used in undergraduate settings,…

Classroom response systems (clickers) are used in many courses at the University of Toronto (U of T), primarily to introduce interactive pedagogy and to engage students in lecture courses. We examined the use of clickers in various courses at U of T and interviewed over 30 instructors about their use of clickers in classes with a total enrolment…

Students in three sections of introductory psychology, N = 1051, were asked about the utility of traditional, e.g. instructor, lectures and textbook, and nontraditional, e.g., clickers, podcasts and online lecture slides, teaching tools. Students who felt unprepared for college (25.9%) differed from their peers in their perceived utility of these…