Clicking their way to success: Using student response systems as a tool for feedback

Value to Marketing Educators: These results demonstrate how the use of clickers can improve marketing education. The results suggest that eliciting performance from students (in this case, responding to questions with clickers) and providing feedback improves students’ learning, performance, and attitudes. This will help marketing educators know when and how to use clickers.

Purpose of the Study: Feedback is identified in many learning theories as a key component to successful learning. This study investigates the effectiveness of providing immediate feedback with student response systems (or “clickers”) on multiple measures of student performance, including exam scores, self-reported understanding and attitudes.

Design and Sample: Prior studies generally show that clickers improve student performance. However, most of these studies cannot identify what causes these improvements. Further, design limitations of many studies, such as lack of control conditions or a between-subjects design, have reduced researchers’ abilities to infer causal relationships between clicker utilization and student learning. The aim of the current research is to help fill this gap in the literature. The first study uses a within-subjects design in which two sections of an undergraduate marketing class used clickers at different times over the course of the semester. The second study replicates the results of the first study using a between-subjects design.

Results: When clickers were used to facilitate feedback, students reported a better understanding of the materials, read more chapters before class, were more likely to recommend the course to others, and had higher exam scores than when clickers were used just for attendance.