Audience Response System (Clickers) in Team Based Learning: The Good, the Bad and the Feedback

Team Based Learning (TBL) is a student-centered instructional strategy which provides students with opportunities to apply their knowledge through a series of activities comprising of individual work, team work, its application to problem-solving task based assignments with immediate feedback to the students by faculty. TBL is a newly introduced instructional strategy at our institute. It is a once weekly activity which forms core instructional strategy in year one. Providing feedback to students is an essential component of TBL which leads to healthy and interactive discussion. Initially we were using scantrons for scoring readiness assurance tests which was leading to ineffective feedback and discussion and infrastructure overload on assessment office. This was also time consuming and lacked the utility of display of student performance in the form of bar graphs. We switched to using an Audience Response System (ARS) in which students used “clickers” produced by Turning Technologies to record student responses in readiness assurances tests and provide immediate feedback to the students at the end of team readiness assurance tests instantaneously in the same session. This also led to improved discussion when compared with Scantrons. Our method also resulted into reduced turnaround time for compiling continuous assessment results and reduced load on faculty and assessment office.