The New York Times-20080128-Students Click- and a Quiz Becomes a Game

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Students Click, and a Quiz Becomes a Game

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The games had begun. In a darkened classroom at Great Neck South High School on a recent afternoon, the Advanced Placement physics students sped through a pop quiz, furiously pressing keys on hand-held clickers. A projection screen tracked their responses in real time, showing who knew what through an animated display of spaceships -- individually numbered for each student -- that blasted off or fell by the wayside with each right or wrong answer.

The students were not competing for grades (it was only a practice quiz), but they certainly acted as if they were.

Let's go, let's go! yelled a boy from the back of the class. What's the next question? The Great Neck district has been introducing the clickers in an effort to liven up traditional classroom teaching with a more interactive approach. After a successful test at one of its high schools, Great Neck expanded the technology to other schools.

The clickers are part of an increasingly popular technology known as an audience response system, which has been used for everything from surveying game show audiences to polling registered voters. That technology is now spreading to public and private schools across the country.

The Los Angeles school district has spent about $503,000 to buy clickers for more than two dozen middle schools since 2005, district officials said. Smaller districts in the Dallas and Atlanta suburbs have also invested in them, according to school officials and companies that manufacture the devices. In New York City, a dozen schools across the five boroughs have experimented with the devices. And in St. Paul, the clickers are routinely used to train teachers and administrators and to get reaction from parents at community meetings.

In a typical system, the clickers record data from individuals, and transmit that information, through wireless technology, to a computer program. The program can instantly display the results, tally them and present them in elaborate spreadsheets and eye-catching graphics like spaceships or Jeopardy!-style boards. It can track the percentage of correct answers received for each question as well as the participation rate among all users.

The growth of the clicker technology in schools has been very big and fast paced, said Jaci Hendricks, a spokeswoman for Qwizdom, one of several companies that manufacture the clickers. In the last five years alone, Qwizdom has supplied more than 750,000 clickers to schools nationwide, including those in Great Neck, New York City and Los Angeles.

In Great Neck, the district spent $18,000 to buy the clickers after its technology director, Marc Epstein, saw them at education conferences. He thought they presented an advance over earlier classroom technology, which he said had focused on providing hardware to students (desktop computers, laptops and printers, for example), or helping teachers deliver lessons (smart boards and projectors).

In contrast, he said, the clickers used technology to assess student learning.

Mr. Epstein found an ally in Randolph Ross, the principal of Great Neck South, who agreed to have the clickers tested at his school, which has 1,300 students, in 2006. Mr. Ross, who constructs crossword puzzles for a hobby, said that some teachers and students had already been requesting an electronic buzzer system to use for classroom Jeopardy! games and quiz bowls.

I'm a big games person, Mr. Ross said. I'm very supportive of all these trivia contests because it's good mental gymnastics and it's fun.

Mr. Ross had just the teacher to try out the new technology: Matt Sckalor, the Advanced Placement physics teacher, who had appeared as a contestant on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire in February 2000. (He did not win any money.)

Mr. Sckalor said that he was sold on the clickers because he could check on the progress of every student, not just the ones who frequently raised their hands and tended to dominate the discussions.

But he has since discovered that incorporating the technology into lessons can be time-consuming, and that the software is not easy to use. He held off introducing them in this year's A.P. physics class until the midterm review, but he said he planned to use them more often for everyday teaching.

Mr. Sckalor started Thursday's class by handing out the red-and-silver clickers to every student. But after two students found a low-battery message on their devices, he had to spend several minutes replacing the batteries. The class was too busy pointing and clicking to notice. Soon, they were so enthralled by the games that they clapped and cheered and yelled as if they were at a football game.

Jake Zeller, a junior, handily beat the other students on the pop quiz and was rewarded by watching his spaceship, No. 18, land on Mars while those of his classmates vaporized.

I like competition, he said. I think it also motivates other students to study harder so they can do better in class.

In the same row, Christin Lee, also a junior, said that the clickers enhanced class participation. A lot of people who were yelling or saying something today, you don't usually hear from them at all, she said. It brings out everyone's personalities. It makes you want to learn.

But Isabel Sukholitsky, a senior, said that she found the rapid-fire questions a bit nerve-racking. On several questions, she said, she knew the answers but could not enter them into the clicker fast enough before time was called.

For everyday lessons, it might be a little much, just because people get riled up and lose focus on what we're actually here for, she said. I'm a very Type A person as it is. I don't need any extra stress in my life.

She was in the minority, however.

Mr. Sckalor directed the students to answer -- on their clickers -- whether they liked the system and wanted to use it more often. Fourteen responded yes, and two no.

Physics can be deadly if it's not fun, Mr. Sckalor said afterward. My philosophy is you have to make it fun. At open houses, parents come in and say all the time, 'I hated physics.'

[Illustration]PHOTOS: As students in Matt Sckalor's physics class at Great Neck South High School click their answers, the results go up on a screen (pg. B4). They can instantly see their progress, and how the class did; Christin Lee, front, uses audience response technology in class at Great Neck South High School. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOYCE DOPKEEN/THE NEW YORK TIMES) (pg. B1)