The effective use of clickers in freshmen classrooms

Clickers a wireless-keypad used in class-polling systems that enable students to answer questions during lectures. Such systems provide an interactive teaching environment with real time feedback for students and teachers on the progress of teaching and learning. Clicker use is becoming more widespread amongst faculty as a means of engaging students in US. However, there is few papers report its effectiveness to Chinese students. In this paper, we will introduce our experiment results in using clickers to enhance active learning in introductory physics lectures in China. The effectiveness of this approach at engaging students in class and confronting misconceptions pertaining to Electricity and Magnetism will be discussed. We compared students' performance of clicker sessions with non-clicker sections and we also compared the performance for both US students and Chinese students. The results from post-test indicate that students using clickers achieved a significant gain in conceptual learning.