Recommended Reading

Audience Response Systems in which were widely adopted in the ness. One study suggests that prepar- Higher Education: Applications 1990s. In one chapter, Eugene Judson ing students for the ill-defined ques- and Cases and Daiyo Sawada examine research on tions they will face in their careers may David A. Banks early ARSs and find there were often no be an effective practice for teaching Information Science Publishing, 2006 significant differences between those and learning. The authors suggest ask- $89.95 (hardcover), 405 pp. who used ARSs and those who did not. ing questions to “…help students to 1-59140-947-0 They offer the advice that simply using learn to reason, think defensively, and a technology in class doesn’t mean the answer future questions.” Reviewed by Mark Werner students are more active or involved in Various authors describe ARSs as facili- constructivist learning. tating a variety of good teaching prac- What are your students thinking Most of Banks’s volume is devoted to tices. These practices include engaging when you are teaching? That’s the 16 case studies describing ARS use in students and encouraging peer instruc- question that interests the authors courses as varied as science, tion. They also include facilitating contributing to Audience Response Sys- engineering, economics, educational diagnostic assessments, to determine a tems in Higher Education: Applications technology, humanities, law, math, baseline for students’ knowledge, and and Cases, an edited volume that will medicine, nutrition, psychology, and formative assessment, which allows a be of interest to faculty members who sociology. The case studies cover a vari- professor to measure students’ concep- seek to teach with audience response ety of approaches to ARS use, including tual understanding during a class. ARSs systems (ARSs) or personal response the way they are used in a particular also promote constructivist methods systems (PRSs) and to academic tech- class, the impact on students and the of teaching, question-based methods, nology support staff in higher edu- classroom culture, and the importance problem-based methods, and methods cation. (You might know of ARSs as of the questions used with ARSs. Two designed to develop critical-thinking “clickers” or “zappers.”) Professors chapters offer methods for evaluat- skills. A few of the case study authors who use ARSs hope that giving stu- ing ARSs, and most studies conclude address the impact of the technology dents the ability to provide feedback with recommendations for how fac- on students, including students’ levels in real time will help them learn more, ulty should teach using ARSs. of anxiety and anonymity. and learn more effectively. The most common concept discussed The final section of the book consists Although ARSs frequently employ is developing appropriate questions. of five chapters devoted to a look ahead handheld remote units, they some- Case studies address forming good ques- to future ARS development. One chapter times employ networks of tions, deciding when to insert ques- describes how cell phones using short , personal digital assistants, tions in a class, the types of questions to message service (SMS) could approxi- cell phones, and even group decision pose (multiple choice, partially-correct mate the functions found in current systems. The chapters of the book multiple choice, and free-form white- ARS systems. It describes how students describe a variety of ARSs. Early sys- board responses), and understanding responded to questions in class by send- tems include the ClassTalk I and II how to map questions to taxonomies ing text messages that were received systems, while more recent systems for higher learning, including Bloom’s on a professor’s laptop computer. The include eInstruction, TurningPoint, Taxonomy and Fink’s Taxonomy of Sig- advantages of this system were that stu- IML, EduCue PRS, KEEPad, ClassIn- nificant Learning. dents already had cell phones and that Hand, and Teamworker GSS. Several cases offer suggestions for the infrastructure the professor needed David Banks divides his volume into forming effective questions. Two case to receive messages was minimal. three sections: one on the historical studies suggest that professors could Another chapter describes an ARS in context of ARS use, one presenting case think about forming questions with which the professor used a handheld studies of clicker use, and one describing many responses (rather than the tra- device to capture student responses. directions for further clicker develop- ditional four or five) because current This system allowed the professor to ment. The historical section describes ARS technology allows for at least 10 freely roam around the room while ARSs employed by the U.S. Air Force as inputs. Studies ask whether questions using the ARS. long ago as the 1950s; by Stanford Uni- should have a right answer or not. One chapter describes a product versity and Cornell University beginning One case study suggests that perhaps called Neo-slate, which allows students in the 1960s; and by IBM in the 1980s. the common practice of providing a to use PDAs to work on a whiteboard Early ARSs employed wired response single, right, multiple-choice response interface anonymously. The term Neo- units at students’ desks. Eventually the could be replaced by several responses, slate comes from “new slate,” which systems used handheld devices, each having varying levels of correct- invokes the image of students of years

© 2008 Mark Werner Number 2 2008 • EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY 83 past using chalk and slate boards at their desks and showing their results to their teachers. With the new PDA- based system, professors can capture students’ work through a connection and display it for others in the class to see. Probably the most interesting and different approach for the future comes from a chapter that discusses a rather low-tech response system called CommuniCubes, which are described as “...lightweight, ten- centimeter cubes, small enough to be handheld and large enough to be visible in a lecture hall seating 400.” These cubes are physical objects with numbers from one to five on each of five faces. Each face also has a dif- ferent color to aid in identifying a student’s response. The advantages of CommuniCubes include no risk of technical failure, low cost (between $1 and $20), fast student training time (one minute), and so on. Students make their selection by showing one face of the cube, and a professor or TA counts the results. This approach, which harkens back to the colored flash cards used by some lecturers pre- viously, may seem foreign, but some- times basic technologies gain momen- tum because of their simplicity. This volume is a useful addition to the libraries of faculty members and academic technologists. The historical section is helpful to remind readers that ARSs were part of a decades-long effort to improve professors’ abilities to better understand their students’ learning in class. The future-looking chapters might be most useful to academic technologists planning to support ARSs or to professors look- ing for different models for ARS use. The case studies could be selectively read for the disciplines they address, the ways they impact various meth- ods of teaching, and particularly in the shaping of questions to be used with ARSs. e

Mark Werner (mark.j.werner@colorado .edu) is Manager of Instructional Technol- ogy Support Services at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

84 EDUCAUSE QUARTERLY • Number 2 2008