More Than Recall and Opinion: Using "Clickers" to Promote Complex Thinking

The authors focused on how a personalized response system ("clickers") could be used to promote more complex thinking in two sections of an intermediate college-level Spanish class. Using Bloom's Revised Taxonomy (2001), they designed questions to go beyond Bloom's lower-order thinking levels (recalling, understanding, and applying) to the higher-order levels (analyzing, evaluating, and creating). During the study, the authors alternated between using clickers and not using clickers, comparing how students performed on various common assessments. They found that students performed slightly better on assessments related to content that had been taught using clickers. More significantly, students engaged more fully in class, talked through complex questions, and explored cultural issues more readily when prompted by clickers.