Clickers and Student Gender

Jeanne Dillon of Argosy University recently emailed me to ask if I knew of any research on the role of gender in the impact of the use of classroom response systems.  Since something is preventing me from replying to her email, I thought I would respond here.  (Jeanne, if you’re reading this, please email me again or leave a comment below.  Thanks!)

Taking a look through my clickers bibliography, I found several research articles that discussed gender differences.  Several studies–Freeman and Blayney (2005), MacGeorge et al (2007), Nicol and Boyle (2003), Rice and Bunz (2003)–found no statistically significant difference between male and female students’ perceptions of the use of classroom response systems (satisfaction, perceived benefits, etc.).  Scornavacca and Marshall (2007) found the same result when looking at a text-messaging-based classroom response system.

Len (2007) found that some of his astronomy students were “self-testers,” preferring to answer clicker questions independently, and some were “collaborator,” preferring to discussion clicker questions with peers before answering.  He found that gender had no impact on the likelihood that a student was a self-test or a collaborator, which is a somewhat surprising result given commonly held beliefs about gender differences and collaborative learning.

The only study I found that looked at the role of gender in the impact of the use of clickers on student learning (as opposed to student perceptions) was Reay, Li, and Bao (2008).  In that study, it was found that the gain for male students from pre-test to post-test was statistically greater than the gain for females when clickers weren’t used.  When clickers were used, the gains were the same, indicating that clickers (and the question sequence pedagogy the instructors used) reduced the performance gap between male and female students.  As I noted in my post about this study, it’s tough to isolate the effect of the clickers here from the overall effect of the question sequence pedagogy used.

In summary, there’s some evidence that gender doesn’t play a role in how student perceive the usefulness of teaching with clickers.  There’s almost no evidence for or against a gender role in the impact of clickers on student learning at this point.  I would encourage Jeanne and others conducting research on classroom response systems to look for any gender differences.  This would seem to be an area of research with great potential.

If you know of any other research along these lines, please let me know.  Thanks!