"Interactive Engagement", Clickers, and the Interactive Lecture

NOTE: This text is pulled from Steve Wolfman's notes after a working group meeting and could use some editing for brevity in wiki format. Please feel free to edit

Interactive methods are well-documented to achieve quantitative improvements in learning over "traditional" lecture. There's an enormous body of literature on this. To pick one article, Hake studied a huge swath of physics students and courses and found significant benefits to "interactive engagement" styles of teaching in 1998. (Hake's work is interesting in part because it's rare to find a study large enough to take whole COURSES as a unit of analysis, as opposed to individual students. That said, it's far from a perfect study.)

Clickers are NOT well-documented to achieve significant improvements over similar low-tech mechanisms when those mechanisms are used in similar ways. Mazur's group actually did a study on that recently and published a tidy little paper.

However, CWSEI and its Colorado counterpart have begun establishing some research results that show clickers to have some possible advantages (e.g., in terms of level of participation). It's also possible to do some things with clickers (discussed in that same Harvard paper above) that you really can't do with cards. Whether you WANT to do those or not is up to you

That said, if your students have clickers, they're pretty easy to use. For non-clicker solutions, try: basic hand-raising, raising a hand with 1-4 fingers to indicate options 1-4, the same but holding to the chest (to avoid students glomming on to other students' responses), using colored index cards, the same but holding them to the chest, using white index cards with colored post-its taped on (these can be held high out front to avoid the answer glomming phenom and then flipped around so people at the back can see).

For those interested in the advantages of traditional lecture, Bligh published an excellent overview in his book "What's the Use of Lectures?" IIRC, his meta-analysis concluded that for some specific low-level learning goals, lecture is no worse than interactive methods and therefore probably a more efficient means to achieve these (although just-in-time teaching proponents would probably argue that the very MOST efficient way to accomplish those types of goals would be to have students learn them on their own from the textbook).