The Clicker Technique: Cultivating Efficient Teaching and Successful Learning LINDSAY S. ANDERSON*, ALICE F. HEALY, JAMES A. KOLE and LYLE E. BOURNE JR. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, USA Summary: The clicker technique is a newly developed system that uses frequent testing in the classroom to enhance students’ understanding and provide feedback to students and teachers. Using a laboratory model of the clicker technique, Experiment 1 explored the effects of the clicker technique, via its potential for compressing learning time and its partially individualized instruction, on the acquisition, retention, and generalization of knowledge at immediate and delayed tests. Results supported the clicker technique as a viable method for instructors to promote generalizable learning and to conserve teaching time. Experiment 2 examined the clicker technique in terms of its components, studying and testing, to determine which components are crucial to its effectiveness. Results indicated that the combination of studying and testing promotes superior performance only during acquisition, relative to either studying or testing alone, and neither study, test, nor the combination of study and test led to a retention advantage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The classroom is a complex social environment in which a teacher and a group of students work together towards the common goal of education. Teachers and students share an overall objective, but the subgoals involved in fulfilling that objective are somewhat different for the two parties. The educator’s subgoal is to convey the new information efficiently, so as to identify and clarify difficult aspects and to adjust the teaching process accordingly. The learners’ subgoal is to acquire new knowledge that will be retained well and be generalizable. The clicker technique is a system that brings together and facilitates the achievement of these teacher and student subgoals. The clicker technique involves instructors, during lectures or demonstrations, giving periodic multiple-choice questions to students, who respond via a hand-held device called a clicker. Instructors receive immediate feedback in the form of a frequency distribution of student selections of each answer, which is usually also available to the class. Clicker-response distributions aid instructors in identifying material that the class largely understands, thus introducing a way to conserve teaching time through the minimization or elimination of understood material from further lecture. The time compression component of the clicker technique caters to the instructor’s goal of efficient and effective teaching; however, compression during teaching is a topic that has been subject to relatively little experimental scrutiny. Study-time compression has been examined indirectly at the individual level in the laboratory using a dropout procedure, in which items mastered on a learning trial are not represented or retested on subsequent learning trials. Performance on list learning tasks under the dropout procedure is often no worse than performance based on full study (Pyc & Rawson, 2007; Rock, 1957), suggesting that time spent on known items might not always be necessary for best performance. More recent evidence shows, however, that full study and dropout are equivalent only when dropped items are periodically retested (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008). If dropped items are not further tested, then learning is better under full study than under the dropout procedure. (For other evidence consistent with this conclusion, see Pyc & Rawson, 2011.) Given the similarities between the clicker technique and the dropout procedure, the often-reported equivalence of dropout and full study procedures highlights a potential way in which the clicker technique can be used to compress, or conserve, teaching time. But note that compression under the clicker technique is based on a group’s performance (i.e., items are dropped from further study if mastered by the majority of the class), whereas it is based on an individual’s performance in the dropout procedure. Anderson, Healy, Kole, and Bourne (2011) provided the first direct evidence that the clicker technique is an effective method of compressing teaching time. Anderson et al. (2011) had participants learn facts about unfamiliar countries across four study-test (tests were via cued recall) learning rounds, and the items selected for presentation in the second and third rounds differed between compression conditions. A comparison of performance at the beginning and at the end of learning demonstrated that both an individualized dropout procedure and a laboratory analog of the clicker procedure are as effective as full study at initial fact acquisition while reducing learning time. However, that study did not provide any evidence on the durability or generalizability of knowledge acquired with the clicker technique, which would be relevant to the learners’ subgoals. Retention can be enhanced by introducing some appropriate level of difficulty during learning (Healy & Bourne, 1995; Schmidt & Bjork, 1992; Schneider, Healy, & Bourne, 2002). Retrieval practice, or testing, is in fact a well-established method of increasing desirable difficulty during learning that enhances long-term retention (Bjork, 1994; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Other studies have shown that, although facts are often rapidly forgotten, they are also highly generalizable (Healy, 2007; Kole & Healy, 2007). Given that the clicker technique utilizes tests, which enhance durability of knowledge, it can be expected that fact knowledge acquired under the clicker technique will be both durable and generalizable. In situ studies of the clicker technique have documented a connection between clicker questions and later positive learning outcomes (Campbell & Mayer, 2009; Donovan, 2008; Kennedy & Cutts, 2005; Mayer et al., 2008), although *Correspondence to: Lindsay S. Anderson, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0345, USA. E-mail: Lindsay.Anderson@colorado.edu Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Appl. Cognit. Psychol. (2012) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.2899