University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: November 8, 2007

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer

Soon after they enter the lecture hall in Diefendorf Hall, South Campus, the nearly 90 fourth-year dental students use their laptops to answer at least one multiple-choice question concerning the practice and ethics of modern dentistry. The answers are instantly projected to the front of the room in the form of a professional-style bar graph.

A dental student uses a "clicker" on her laptop—the calculator-like icon on the left side of the screen—to answer questions posed by instructor Chester Gary during a recent class meeting.
PHOTO: CELINE TAN

John Maggio and Chester Gary, clinical assistant professors of restorative dentistry who co-teach the early morning class, are among a growing number of UB faculty members employing "audience response systems"—nicknamed "clickers"—a new, high-tech trend in classroom learning whose popularity has been skyrocketing at universities across the country.

What makes the audience response system in the School of Dental Medicine unique in relation to the university-wide UBclicks project—a UBIT-supported project aimed at integrating clickers into classrooms across campus—is that the school uses a special software that enables students' laptops to serve as clickers, eliminating the need for the small remote-control devices required in other courses employing similar technology. The "vPad" software, provided by Turning Technologies, a company specializing in audience response systems for business and higher education, is installed on incoming students' laptops at orientation. Students in the dental school have been using computers to access textbooks and other instructional material since the School of Dental Medicine joined the Electronic Curriculum Project in 1999. All UB dental students have been required to own laptops for at least the past five years.

"I think all the reasons I have for using clickers would fall under the umbrella of engaging students," says Maggio. "It's not easy to motivate [dental school] seniors because they're in their 20th year of education—21st if you count kindergarten—and they're tired. This is really making it a much more active classroom. It's a good way to motivate them and they really seem to enjoy it."

The benefits of using clickers include increasing participation, instantly gauging student comprehension, encouraging information retention and promoting in-class discussion, he says, as well as boosting attendance levels by using students' answers to determine who's in class and calculate participation grades.

"It helps you pay attention and reinforces what the lecture contains," notes Callie Davis, a fourth-year student in Gary and Maggio's class on "Practice and Risk Management." "The questions reinforce what the main points are—what they really want us to take away from it."

According to psychologists, students in their mid-20s have an average attention span of about eight minutes, says Maggio. In order to help keep students on track, he includes nearly a dozen audience-response questions in each 90-minute class.

"The key is there has to be some level of entertainment in the lecture," he explains. "I've had a couple of students call my class the game show, but they love it."

In addition to reviewing major ideas from reading assignments and reinforcing key concepts at the top of class, Maggio says clickers have affected his teaching style by encouraging greater in-class participation from students.

"They raise their hands much more often, they're discussing things much more, they're participating more than they ever have," he says, noting that his classes featured very little discussion or debate before the introduction of the audience-response technology. "You can make the argument that the audience isn't the audience anymore because they're involved," he says. "They're part of the show."

Lisa Delucia, a student in the course, agrees that seeing classmates' opinions instantly pop up in front of the room urges everyone to speak up more in class.

"I find that there's more participation in the classes with the vPad as opposed to the classes without," she says. "I think we've definitely gone from passively sitting there to actively being involved in class. It's not like a poll we're all filling out on paper and will find out the results next week. It's an instant snapshot of how the class views a topic or opinion.

"I think it's what our generation is used to: instantaneous, technology-based results," she adds.

Although requiring laptops in class does introduce a potentially distracting technology into the learning environment, Maggio says the benefits of clickers are great if they're employed frequently and creatively. Using survey questions to encourage class discussion and posing important questions for review and attendance purposes—as well as subtracting participation points for incorrect answers to certain questions—strongly discourages students from emailing friends and surfing the Web, Maggio says.

"My technique is giving them enough frequent questions—and having them count for credit—that they want to participate," he says. "I had a student tell me recently that he's not even tempted to check the scores on ESPN anymore."

Other instructors are catching on to students' interest in audience-response systems, adds Maggio, noting that colleagues have been speaking to him about introducing the technology into their classes as well. He also says that he and Gary plan to use the system next semester in a class for second-year dental students and that Louis Goldberg, professor of oral diagnostic sciences and chair of the curriculum committee in the School of Dental Medicine, recently sat in on one of his classes to observe the clickers in action.

Administrators in the dental school point out that ongoing technology upgrades on the South Campus are making laptops and clickers a viable option in an increasing number of classrooms.

"We have at least four rooms [upgraded for clickers] and we have plans for more on our campus," says Maggio. "I'm looking forward to the day where I walk in and it's not something new—we're just using it."