Use context: You want students to be more engaged and active during class. You also want to focus your teaching on areas that are most challenging for students.

**Description:** Clickers are audience response systems that enable a teacher to record student responses. Use of clicker devices or software increases student interaction and engagement through an active learning approach. The teacher poses different types of questions during class for students to answer. The questions can assess prior understanding, test comprehension of course material and/or provide formative feedback. Clickers allow the teacher to adapt teaching to common misunderstanding and/or activate student engagement. 

**Table of Content**

# 🥕 Ingredients

### 🥣 Tools

- [ ]  a computer, tablet or phone
- [ ]  an online service that has clicker functionality, such as Zoom polls, Wooclap, Socrative or Mentimeter
- [ ]  ideas and/or brainpower to create questions for use in class

**tools students are required to have**

- [ ]  as clickers are commonly used in the classroom, students need to have access to a computer, tablet or smartphone with internet access, alternatively download the app of the service on their phones. There are also devices available, but this would lead to additional costs and administration for the department. Considering that most students have access to a smartphone or a computer, the first option (using a service) is preferred.

### ⏲️ **Time to prepare**

Depending on how many questions you want to use in class, a few minutes to a few hours. Consider starting small and testing clickers in one of your lectures with a few questions, and then expand within the class and to other lectures. 

# 🧑‍🍳 Preparation      [🔝](<https://recipes4teaching.notion.site/Clickers-aka-polls-in-class-181704334d3f4ddc936a0accfb887a75>)

### Prepare your content

**Prepare and create some questions**

Clickers can be used with many different types of questions and also focus on several different goals. The questions can assess students' prior understanding, test comprehension of course material, provide formative feedback, and also break up your lecture and therefore potentially increase attention. Some **potential types of questions** are:

- Ask students if they have done the reading. Though the usefulness of this approach could be questioned, if you have noticed a lack of preparation, this simple question at the beginning of every lecture might nudge some students to start preparing for the class.
- When testing *students' prior understanding* you might want to use simpler multiple-choice questions, such as the meaning of certain concepts or terms. You could also ask questions about reading material that students prepared for class, e.g. the main facts of a case, the main legal challenges discussed in an article.