Teaching With Student Response System Technology: A Survey Of K-12 Teachers

Background

Student response systems are a mature, scaleable technology that has the potential to improve classroom participation and student achievement (Roschelle, Penuel, & Abrahamson, 2004). Such systems entail sets of “clickers” with radio transmission of input, enabling teachers to pose questions of all students and gain immediate feedback about student understandings in a class. When used in conjunction with interactive teaching strategies such as peer discussion, such systems have been shown in past studies to produce gains in conceptual understanding in science (Crouch & Mazur, 2001).

Most studies of student response systems have examined teaching and learning outcomes at the undergraduate level, yet such systems are becoming much more widespread in K-12 settings. For example, eInstruction, whose users were surveyed as part of the current study, has distributed over one million response pads to elementary, middle, and high school students. At present, little is known about how teachers use these kinds of response systems in K-12 settings or what they believe about the effectiveness of such systems. The current questionnaire study is a first step toward understanding how teachers in K-12 settings integrate student response systems into their teaching.