What is a student response system?
You ask a multiple-choice or short question. Every student answers privately. A chart shows the spread of answers, and you decide what to do next.
The field has many names. A review of 67 peer-reviewed papers found 26 different labels for the same technology. Common ones are audience response system, personal response system, electronic voting system and student response system. In the UK you will also hear voting handsets or keypads. In the US, most people say clickers.
Does a student response system improve learning?
Yes, modestly. How much depends on the questions and on what the teacher does with the answers.
- A 2016 meta-analysis by Hunsu, Adesope and Bayly, covering 53 articles and 26,095 students, found "small but significant effects on measures of knowledge transfer", as summarized in a later review for health professions teaching.
- The Kay and LeSage review mentioned above listed the main benefits as better attendance, attention, participation and engagement, more discussion and contingent teaching, and better formative feedback. The main challenges for teachers were setup time, writing good questions, covering the syllabus and responding to the results on the spot.
- More broadly, a meta-analysis of 225 studies in university science courses found that students under traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in active-learning classes.
For a closer look at the studies, see what the research shows about clickers in the classroom.
What types of student response system are there?
| Radio clickers | Phone or laptop apps | Scanned paper cards | Low-tech | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What students hold | A handheld keypad | Their own phone, tablet or laptop | A printed card with a code | A whiteboard or colored cards |
| Network needed | No (own radio link) | Yes (Wi-Fi or mobile data) | Teacher's phone; can run offline | No |
| Phones out in class | No | Yes | Teacher's only | No |
| Per-student record | Yes, if clickers are linked to names | Yes, via log-in | Yes, via card number | No |
| Free-text answers | Usually no | Yes | No | Yes, on whiteboards |
| Speed to start | Seconds | Minutes (join, log in) | Seconds | Seconds |
Radio clickers
Each student has a small keypad that sends answers by radio to a USB receiver on the teacher's computer. Nothing to log in to, no network and no phones. They start in seconds and don't depend on the room's network. The trade-offs are the hardware itself, the job of handing out and collecting the set, and no free-text answers on most keypads.
Phone and laptop apps
Tools such as Mentimeter, Slido, Poll Everywhere and Kahoot! let students answer on a device they already own. There is no hardware to buy or carry, and open questions, word clouds and remote participation are easy.
The trade-offs: every student needs a charged device and a working connection, and the phone in their hand also holds every other app. If a few students have no phone, no data or a flat battery, you need a backup.
Scanned paper cards
Plickers is the best-known example. Each student holds up a printed card, turned to show their answer, and the teacher scans the room with the Plickers mobile app. Students need no device or account. The teacher needs a phone in hand during the lesson, and scanning works best when cards are held clearly in view.
Low-tech options
Mini whiteboards, colored ABCD cards and fingers-up voting cost almost nothing and need no setup. The limits: answers are visible to classmates (so less honest), nothing is saved, and in a room of 200 you can't count them.
Which questions should you ask before choosing?
- Are phones allowed? In the US, at least 40 states plus Washington, D.C. now require districts to ban or restrict student phone use, according to Education Week. In England, the Department for Education says all schools should be mobile phone-free environments by default. If you teach in a K-12 school in the US or a primary or secondary school in England, a phone-based system may conflict with school policy. Universities set their own rules, often lecturer by lecturer.
- How reliable is the network in your room? Test it with a full class, not an empty room.
- Who pays? Check whether students are asked to buy a device or a subscription, and whether that repeats every term or semester. If they are, see iClicker alternatives without student fees.
- Do you need per-student records? For participation marks or graded quizzes, you need named results you can export. For honest opinions, you need a true anonymous mode.
- How big are your groups? A system that is fine for 25 pupils may struggle with a 300-seat lecture hall (or lecture theatre).
- What do you present with? Some systems run inside PowerPoint, some in a browser tab, some in their own app. Rebuilding your existing slides in another tool can take hours, so check which one fits the decks you already have.
- Who supports it? If it needs IT to approve an app or open a firewall, ask before you buy.
The classroom response system buyer's guide turns these questions into a checklist.
How should you roll one out?
Start with one class. Pick a course where you already ask questions out loud. Replace three of them with response-system questions.
Plan three types of question per lesson: one at the start to see what students already know, one or two in the middle at the point where they usually go wrong, and one at the end as an exit check.
Keep teaching questions ungraded. Kay and LeSage list negative reactions to being monitored among the challenges for students. If you want participation marks, award them for answering at all, whatever the answer.
Use the split. When the class divides between two answers, stop, ask students to discuss with a neighbor for two minutes, and ask again. In a University of Colorado genetics course, this peer discussion step improved understanding even when no one in the group had known the answer at first.
Share across a department. A class set of clickers in a carry case can move from room to room. Size the set for the largest class that uses it, and agree a booking list so two teachers don't need it in the same period. For a step-by-step first lesson, see how to use clickers in the classroom.
If phones are out and you want per-student data, OMBEA ResponsePads are one option: a radio link with no Wi-Fi or app, up to 2,000 students in one session, and results in PowerPoint. The schools page and higher education page show how it works in a lesson and a lecture, and the features page covers anonymous and named modes.
