Examining the effects of displaying clicker voting results on high school students' voting behaviors, discussion processes, and learning outcomes

This study explores the relationship between students' clicking behaviors, discussion processes, learning outcomes, and a prominent feature of clicker systems-the whole class' response results aggregated by clickers in real time. The results indicate that, while teaching Newton's laws of motion, displaying the real-time responses of the whole class to clicker questions can influence students' discussion processes and conceptual learning outcomes. The results have practical significance because that (1) the instructional design presented in this study (i.e., peer instruction) is widely used in clicker-integrated science instruction; and that (2) the effect sizes reported in this study are larger than the small magnitude. Implications for science teaching and technological development with clickers are discussed. A prototype of an advanced clicker system, developed based on the results of this empirical study, is presented at the end of this article.