A Comparison of Active Student Responding Modalities in a General Psychology Course

Research on teaching has shown that incorporating active student responding (ASR) into classroom instruction facilitates learning and should be considered best practice. Nevertheless, few published studies have examined ASR using a within-participant design across a semester. Using a counterbalanced alternating treatment design, a direct comparison of three ASR methods (clickers, response cards, and hand-raising) and a control condition was conducted across four sections of a general psychology course. Students scored almost 5% higher on exams after utilizing an ASR approach than during control conditions. However, no statistically significant differences were found between experimental conditions. These data suggest that meaningful gains in exam performance are most likely due to the presentation of review questions rather than the use of specific ASR modalities.