Megan Donahue Ph.D.

Megan Donahue is an Associate Professor of Physics at Michigan State University where she has been teaching with clickers for 3 semesters in a large lecture course (up to 250 students at once).

"The student transmitter technology has transformed the way I approach teaching a large class. Now, when I think of what I want the students to learn I also try to figure out how to help them learn it, and how to reveal any misconceptions or problems they might have with the material well before I test them on it. My use and policies regarding clickers in the classroom are completely driven by my pedagogical goals for clickers: as feedback to me the instructor, as feedback to the students, as rewards for preparation and active attendance. I want students to think now. It is easy for any of us, as students, to think that we can write it down now and think about it later. But it is much more effective learning to engage in the thinking process early. I want my students to think in class. I want to give them incentive to read and prepare before class. I want to reward them for doing the right things by their learning: attend class even on Fridays, read the book ahead of lecture, talk to other students about the material. Most of my students are freshmen and sophomores who are still adjusting to the freedom and responsibilities of learning in college. I don't want them to have to wait until the results of Exam 1 to find out their study habits are not what they should be. I use clicker questions to focus classroom discussions. In a class as large as 250, I find that a pair and share activity is more directed if they know they have to answer a clicker question afterwards. My clicker policies are: A student buys and maintains his or her own transmitter. I immediately use the transmitters, starting on day 1 or 2, but the grades don't count until the beginning of the 3rd week. This time gives students a chance to buy a transmitter, figure out how it works, and practice using it in class with no repercussions either way. Once I start collecting for a participation grade, I rate an answer to a question with a right/wrong answer with 3 points if it is right and 2 points if it is wrong. That way, I reward being there, but give slightly extra reward for being right. I don't want this experience to be a "quiz a day". 10% of the final grade is for participation. Now measuring this quantity is quite fair - I have data for nearly every day of class. I drop the scores of the 8 lowest days for each student (the class meets 3 days a week for 14 weeks). That way, the occasional forgotten clicker, illness, athlete travel, and so on do not matter to the final grade. I believe this policy structure creates an environment that is relatively low-key, but rewards preparation and constructive participation. In my exams, I find that the topics on which I have spent time covering with clicker questions are the topics on which the students are quite successful. If I didn't cover a topic with a question -- sometimes I'd think "of course they know this" -- and the students would not perform nearly as well on questions covering that material. Finally, I tested similar exam questions that I used while not using clickers on exams given to classes where I did use clickers. I found a significant improvement on those questions that I covered with clickers. The lecture presentation was similar -- I even asked a similar class question to the previous class (but did not collect an answer). The results were significantly better in the clicker class. One could protest that perhaps the later class knew about the questions in advance. But the former class had the questions in exam #1 and on the final. The later class in its exam #1 exceeded the former class' performance on the final for that particular question, but answered with very similar proportions to those questions about topics I did not cover in a clicker question. The bottom line is that a student is demonstrably much more likely to retain content and reasoning skills that they gain from interacting with me in class. Using clickers forces this interaction. It would be interesting to see how much better they maintain such gains over a longer term. With this new clicker technology researchers interested in pedagogy can begin study things like this on a scale that was not possible previously." - Megan Donahue Megan Donahue is an Associate Professor of Physics at Michigan State University where she has been teaching with clickers for 3 semesters in large lecture course (up to 250 students at once). Her research interests include Astronomy and Astrophysics including X-ray emissions from in intracluster gas and Hubble Space Telescope observations of distant galaxies.