Clickers at New Student Orientation

I thought about just posting this news item to Twitter, but there’s a great quote I wanted to share that wouldn’t fit in a tweet.  The University of Wisconsin-Madison, no stranger to teaching with clickers, featured some useful clicker questions in its recent orientation for first-year undergraduates.  A session titled “MADE: I Am a Badger,” facilitated by the Center for the First-Year Experience, included some clicker questions designed to help the new students get to know each other.

Questions included biggest concerns for college, where students expect to make friends and how much they studied in high school. The point of which, Lederman said, was to demonstrate how diverse expectations and anticipations are.

Given my experience with similar questions at my institution, I can imagine that goal was met.  However, the clicker questions had a very different, but, I think, complementary effect, too.

“I’ve always been worried about grades and balancing everything, but now that other people I know have those same feelings, it’s comforting,” incoming freshman Jesse Leung said after the session.

Here’s an example of the power of real-time display of the results of a student perspective question.