Students learn more in class when faculty members use clickers to assess what the students are learning, a new study from the University of Iowa suggests.

The study, co-authored by William Hedgcock, assistant professor of marketing in the Tippie College of Business, finds that students were more apt to read the textbooks, enjoyed the class more, and received grades that were one-third of a grade higher when they used clickers.

Clickers are small remote control devices that allow students to answer short true-false or multiple choice quizzes during a class. Teachers can see their students’ responses immediately and can use that information to determine how well the students understand the material and if they need to continue working on it.

UI faculty used clickers in 84 classes during the current fall and recent summer terms, and Hedgcock is enthusiastically one of them. He used his first experience with classroom clickers as the basis of his study, which was co-authored by Rob Rouwenhorst, a Tippie alumnus and former lecturer who now teaches at St. Ambrose University in Davenport.

The experiment took place while Hedgcock taught two sections of the Consumer Behavior course. Hedgcock had his students use clickers for a portion of the semester, giving short mid-class quizzes to assess the students’ understanding of the material, and also asked questions relating directly to material in the textbook. In other portions of the semester, he used clickers only to take attendance, not for assessment purposes.

The research found that test scores were higher at the end of the portions of the semester in which clickers were used for assessment than the tests given at the end of that part of the semester where clickers were used only for attendance.

Hedgcock and Rouwenhorst found that using a clicker increased the students’ understanding of the material, which was reflected by better grades on tests. They found that a student’s grade increased by one third when clickers were used, so, for instance, a B would have become a B+.

Hedgcock says it also led to livelier and more thoughtful classroom discussions, and a survey the students completed at the end of the semester found they were more confident in their grasp of the material. When clickers were used, the students reported they understood the material better than they did when clickers weren’t used. The reason, he says, is that clickers show students what they don’t know.

“The students felt that they were better able to assess their own comprehension when they used clickers,” he says. “The daily questions showed them when they didn’t understand the material, and so they increased their study time. Once that was taken care of, their exam scores followed.”

A second experiment the following semester used clickers throughout the class, and Hedgcock says test scores showed similar continued improvement.

The study is published in the current issue of The Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education.