Personal response devices, “clickers,” that allow students to answer questions and see on a projected screen the results of their voting, followed by discussion and reprocessing, is a form of educational technology that has been embraced by instructors of large classes, particularly in the natural sciences. This dissertation describes their use in an unusual setting, that of developmental writing.
This case study proceeds from looking at three of the researcher’s fall 2007 Basic Writing classes first through the prism of a written assignment on their participation in their previous English class and a personal technologies survey, to later looking at eleven students’ responses to and work within clicker lessons through videotaped observations, student written responses and post-semester interviews. Trying to appeal to the generational and affective factors that traditional age basic writers present, I wanted to see if overlap between those data sets might inform me on my students’ use of clickers in my classes.
I discovered that these students bring a lack of meaningful experience with co-construction of knowledge to the basic writing classroom and that their work there is hampered by wariness about classmates and a wish to multi-task rather than focus. Further, one class showed several students using a discourse pattern of a series of one-on-one discussions with the instructor while the other class showed a more complex pattern where a few dominant students co-constructed among themselves in a more extended manner. Ironically, the class where students used the simpler discourse patterns had a higher number of verbal participants, and more students credited classmates as influential. Students who saw clicker lessons as integral to their learning (perhaps because it blended with their acknowledged learning style) had a more successful experience than those who saw clicker lessons as peripheral and something that had been imposed upon them. In the most positive manifestation of our use of clickers in the classroom, some students came to see their classmates’ portfolio revision work as relevant and inspiring models that they could apply to their own work.