18 - Enhancing Student Participation and Attitudes in a Large-Lecture Calculus Course

Summary

Introduction

Good communication is essential in every relationship. This includes the relationship that I cultivate with my students as individuals and with my class as a whole. A personal response system, “clickers,” is a tool that I have employed to aide communication.

While there are a variety of options for engaging students in the classroom, I specifically chose this technology because my students are part of the Millennial generation and I believed clickers would be a means to engage them using a digital form of communication. They've grown up with technology playing a role in nearly every facet of their lives, with this likely to increase as time passes. A May 2008 report from In-Stat predicts “a steady growth rate culminating in the number of US millennia's subscribing to mobile social networking reaching nearly 30 million by the year 2012 [46].” Many attributes of the clicker emulate my students' current social networks. At the simplest level, my students become members of a group by enrolling in the course. However, the ability to efficiently ask the entire class for input on a topic, followed with the means to immediately share the overall results with them, actually allows them to communicate with each other, as well as with me.

Background

I teach at a regional university with an enrollment a little over 10,000 which offers 77 different majors, and graduate programs in 22 different fields.