ELI Web Seminar, October 5, 2009 1:00 p.m. ET (12:00 p.m. CT, 11:00 a.m. MT, 10:00 a.m. PT); runs one hour

Clickers and Peer Instruction: A Powerful Way to Improve Student Engagement and Learning, but Only If You Do It Right

Special Guest

Douglas Duncan
Faculty, Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado, and
Director, Fiske Planetarium

Douglas Duncan is a faculty member in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado, where he directs the Fiske Planetarium. He began his career at the Carnegie Observatories, where he was part of a project that found sunspot cycles on other stars. Subsequently, he joined the staff of the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1992, he accepted a joint appointment at the University of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium, beginning a trend of modernization of planetariums that has spread to New York, Denver, and Los Angeles.

Duncan is the author of “Clickers in the Classroom,” a guide to the powerful new technology that enables teachers to know what all their students are thinking, not just those who raise their hands. He has served as national education coordinator for the American Astronomical Society and has led efforts for better teaching and public communication for astronomers throughout the United States. From 1997 to 2002 he did science commentary on the Chicago public radio station WBEZ. He has authored over 50 refereed publications and his work has been funded by NSF, NASA, the Smithsonian, and the National Geographic Society. Duncan is now part of the University of Colorado group, founded by Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman, which researches better ways of teaching science.

Summary

Malcolm Brown, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative director, will moderate this web seminar with Douglas Duncan, where he’ll share his strategies and proven experiences in effectively using clickers in the classroom. Duncan has been using clickers at the University of Colorado, where over 17,000 clickers are in use. He’ll share data gathered during the past few years that has yielded a number of effective pedagogical strategies in their implementation and deployment. Strategies that led to successful use, and mistakes that led to failure, have been found to be very repeatable; these will be discussed. Results from a PhD thesis in sociology examining how the culture of a classroom changes when the instruction becomes more interactive, and student opinions about this, will be highlighted.

Additional Resources

• Tips for Successful “Clicker” Use
• 7 Things You Should Know About Clickers
• EDUCAUSE and ELI student response system/clicker research, articles, and white papers