2008 Woodie Awards
Students click in class with remotes
Issue date: 3/6/08
Students who continue to attend class are forced to pay attention to the lecturer so that when asked a multiple-choice question, students can answer the question to the best of their ability.
"To me, the clickers seem to have two positive immediate effects. Firstly, more kids end up in class than there may be without them and secondly, it keeps students engaged and checks their knowledge on what the professor has done in class," freshman Max Trumble said.
The CPS program was created by Darrell Ward, who strived to create an audience response system in which students could openly answer questions while remaining anonymous to everyone else in the class. In this way, Ward's system has succeeded.
Only the professor knows students' answers, a key advantage to the use of CPS, especially in competitive classes where students may be more reluctant to raise their hands, and risk possibly being wrong in front of 200 other students.
Classes can also study the data once students punch in their answers because the program runs in real time.
A graph appears on the projector of how many students chose answers A, B, C, D or E.
The class can then analyze each answer and the professor can explain the difference between the right and wrong answers.
Happy with the system's capability of showing what questions students can and cannot comprehend, Barnett said, "[The system is] so the professor knows what students understand and don't understand.
Barnett has never lost any data and does not know of any colleagues who have had problems with using CPS.
While hundreds of colleges across the country use the CPS program with satisfied results, occasionally the system malfunctions.
The University of Kansas experienced such a failure recently when almost 1,000 students' grades in a biology class miraculously disappeared - every student's grade showed up as an A+.
But at Hopkins the program is used only for answering multiple-choice questions in class and not for exams so the risk of this type of malfunction is minor.
There is still an imminent chance of malfunction, which could hurt Hopkins students' attendance report and effectively their grades. Yet most professors still seem confident that the system will hold up its reputation.
"To me, the clickers seem to have two positive immediate effects. Firstly, more kids end up in class than there may be without them and secondly, it keeps students engaged and checks their knowledge on what the professor has done in class," freshman Max Trumble said.
The CPS program was created by Darrell Ward, who strived to create an audience response system in which students could openly answer questions while remaining anonymous to everyone else in the class. In this way, Ward's system has succeeded.
Only the professor knows students' answers, a key advantage to the use of CPS, especially in competitive classes where students may be more reluctant to raise their hands, and risk possibly being wrong in front of 200 other students.
Classes can also study the data once students punch in their answers because the program runs in real time.
A graph appears on the projector of how many students chose answers A, B, C, D or E.
The class can then analyze each answer and the professor can explain the difference between the right and wrong answers.
Happy with the system's capability of showing what questions students can and cannot comprehend, Barnett said, "[The system is] so the professor knows what students understand and don't understand.
Barnett has never lost any data and does not know of any colleagues who have had problems with using CPS.
While hundreds of colleges across the country use the CPS program with satisfied results, occasionally the system malfunctions.
The University of Kansas experienced such a failure recently when almost 1,000 students' grades in a biology class miraculously disappeared - every student's grade showed up as an A+.
But at Hopkins the program is used only for answering multiple-choice questions in class and not for exams so the risk of this type of malfunction is minor.
There is still an imminent chance of malfunction, which could hurt Hopkins students' attendance report and effectively their grades. Yet most professors still seem confident that the system will hold up its reputation.
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