Clicking on the learning light for community college students

Community colleges and their faculty are attempting to respond to the continuous rising failure rates of their students with various technological tools in the classroom. This study investigated the efficacy of clickers using a pretest-posttest nonequivalent group design. Specifically, measurements were used within a comparative quasi-experiment to determine if student learning performance was greater in a U.S. History class using clicker technology verses the control group that did not use clickers. Both classes were taught by the same instructor using active learning principles instead of straight didactic lecture. Quantitative data was collected and analyzed using 67 participants to determine to what extent the use of clickers enhance student learning and academic performance on formative and summative assessments over the course of an eighteen week semester. The class that did not use clicker technology posted higher average performance on assessments of both types. However, the results were not statistically significant between pretest results and posttests gains when comparing the two classes. While both groups demonstrated significant gains in learning, the clickers did not magically raise student learning performance. The research suggests that further investigations into the cognitive adjustments for students using technology needs to occur. While students, especially those of the Net Generation, are surrounded with and comfortable using various forms of technology, using clickers takes an adjustment in cognitive learning and is not intuitive. According to this study, just adding clickers to the classroom setting will not improve student performance.