Students respond differently in class when they’re asked to raise their hands and when they use electronic clickers, finds a study by Dan Levy, Joshua Yardley, and Richard Zeckhauser at Harvard Kennedy School. The researchers divided more than 1,100 students in 22 different classes into two groups: one would respond to questions by raising their hands; the other used clickers. For most questions, answers differed significantly between the hand-raisers and the students with clickers. In more than half of the cases, the difference between groups was more than 10 percentage points. When answers “matter” (i.e., when the question has only one correct answer or is sensitive), students raising their hands have a tendency to herd and vote with the majority, the authors say. 11% of questions elicited unanimous responses from hand raising, but no clicker response led to a unanimous outcome. The results suggest that the technique for eliciting choices affects individual responses in group settings.
Source: New Research: Clickers May Promote Honesty in the Classroom
