Improving Traditional Lectures with Personal Response Systems

This position paper argues in favor of integrating personal response systems (PRSs) also known as audience response systems or clickers into traditional lectures to increase student engagement, participation, and achievement. Traditional lectures have been disregarded as an effective method of teaching and learning (Freisen, 2011). They are inferior in facilitating learning primarily because they use a transmissive form of pedagogy (McWilliam, 2008). In a traditional lecture, it is difficult to gauge the progress of students, whether they understand the material, and whether they are ready to move on to a new topic (Voelkel & Bennett, 2013). Furthermore, traditional lectures do not give students the skills needed for success such as collaborating and communicating with others and thinking critically (Terenzini et al., 2001).