Call for Proposals: Teaching with Clickers in Mathematics
Along with my colleagues Kien Lim (University of Texas-El Paso) and Kelly Cline (Carroll College), I’m organizing a contributed paper session at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco this January 2010. If you use clickers in your mathematics teaching, I want to encourage you to submit an abstract for a talk. Details below. Thanks!
Engaging Students with Classroom Voting
Thursday morning, January 14th
Derek Bruff, Vanderbilt University, Kien Lim, University of Texas at El Paso, and Kelly Cline, Carroll College
Classroom voting is a teaching method in which students are asked to respond to multiple-choice or numeric-result questions posed by their instructors during class, often using handheld transmitters (“clickers”) that allow for the instant display of distributions of responses. Classroom voting can be used to make on-the-fly teaching choices that are responsive to student learning needs, to generate small-group and whole-class discussion, and to create “times for telling” in which student misconceptions are uncovered and addressed. Clickers allow students to respond to questions independently and without their peers knowing how they have responded while allowing instructors to track student responses and thus expect full participation.
We seek papers on classroom voting that focus on at least one of these areas: teaching objectives (e.g., writing effective questions, engendering cognitive conflicts, addressing misconceptions), instructional strategies (e.g., peer instruction, team-based learning, methods of guiding class discussions), new technologies (e.g., using cell phones as clickers, integration with online resources), impact on students (e.g., enhanced student learning, increased student engagement, improved retention), overcoming constraints (e.g., limited class time for active learning), development of new materials (e.g. new sets of classroom voting questions) and strategies for getting started at the course and department level.