Sophie Dillman ’10 and James Wolff ’10 wield clickers in Clare O’Connor’s “The Genetic Century” class. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Three minutes into her biology class for non-majors, “The Genetic Century,” Professor Clare O’Connor fires off her first question:

“How many genes are identical in fraternal twins?

A) 100 percent
B) 2/3
C) 50 percent
D) 1/3
E) Number is highly variable.”

Students crane their necks to read the text on the screen behind her, bobbing back and forth among their neighbors to confer before the 30-second clock at the top of the screen runs out. Some shrug and shake their heads, others light up with confidence, but no one raises a hand. Instead, the students each pick up their newest classroom gadget—a handheld electronic remote control–like device—and punch one of six gray buttons at their fingertips.

O’Connor’s classroom, Higgins 300, is one of 25 at Boston College outfitted with “clicker” technology, electronic voting systems that use individual handheld devices to transmit student responses via radio waves to a hub connected to the professor’s computer. The professor can set the countdown for any amount of time, but when time runs out, the students’ answers are tallied immediately for the class to see as a bar graph. The system saves the data on the professor’s computer; after class, O’Connor can check which students answered specific questions, and whether or not they answered correctly—for this class, or for any of the other previous meetings during the semester.

Although relatively new to Boston College, clicker systems began to appear in university classrooms about four years ago, says Elizabeth Clark, the director of instructional design and e-teaching services at Boston College. Now, Clark says, they are ubiquitous at larger universities. Last year, at the urging of several professors in the physics and biology departments, Clark began a voluntary pilot program at Boston College, mostly within the departments of mathematics and the sciences. Several systems were tested, including one in which clickers came equipped with LCD screens and full alphabet capability. Simpler proved more effective, however, with the majority of professors favoring the model used in O’Connor’s class, manufactured by the company I-Clicker.

Theresa Donohue ’11 responds to a question from a team of student presenters. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Students buy their personal I-Clicker units at a one-time cost of $35.00 ($26.50 if used) and register them with their professor online at the beginning of each semester. The software works with PowerPoint and Blackboard Vista, an online system that Boston College instructors use to store course materials, issue and collect assignments, and communicate with students. For every 100 clickers purchased, the University gets a free receiver. Classrooms are being outfitted with the technology based on requests from professors, according to Clark.

For Boston College students in large math and science classes, clickers are no longer a novelty: “For us, it’s what you bring to class: paper, pencil, and clicker,” says Erik Sardina ’09, a history and theology student in the pre-med program. A student in Andrzej Herczynski’s 110-student “Introduction to Physics” class, a calculus-based science requirement for pre-med students, Sardina has come to appreciate the six or seven clicker questions Herczynski integrates into each session. “Not only does it help you stay focused,” he says, “it’s a way to slow down and make sure you understand things.”

For smaller, more intimate classes, or for courses in the humanities, clickers make less sense, says Clark. “It’s very hard to ask multiple choice questions about a book. . . . And if the class is small enough,” she says, “you don’t need technology to help keep people involved.”

Herczynski, who recommended the technology to Boston College when he first learned about it in 2005, agrees. But for scientists teaching large classes, he says, clickers provide a useful two-way communication tool. Science, says Herczynski, “easily lends itself to this kind of diagnostic: Do the students understand a topic? Do we, as instructors, need to explain it differently?” Before clickers, he says, “I would ask questions and take counts of raised hands to take inventory.” But it was difficult, he says, “to get an accurate idea of who knew what, especially since many people would be shy and just wait to see the answer.”

Now, like most other professors using the clicker technology, Herczynski gives a small amount of credit to his students for answering each question. “It’s a way to take attendance, involve the entire class, and a way to keep people on their toes,” he says. On Fridays, in his introductory physics classes, however, he begins each session with a question not about science, but about classical music, playing an excerpt by a composer whose birthday is on or near the date, and then asking his students “some tiny, trivial piece of information about it,” in his words. (“I keep waiting for him to play Beethoven or Bach,” says Ryan Moore ’09, “but he never goes that easy.”)

It is Herczynski’s perception that attendance in his classes is up since he started using the clickers, though even before, his seats were usually filled. Other professors report similar results, though as with any data collection system, they admit, anomalies can be introduced.

“Last year, in our last [introductory biology] class before Thanksgiving,” says Allison Thunstrom ’10, a pre-med student, “a hundred clickers rang in answers to a question, but there were only 50 people in the classroom.” Her professor laughed it off and disregarded any data from that day. “He knew it was just because it was before vacation,” says Thunstrom, who adds that students generally don’t ask others to serve as proxies for them.

With 10 seconds left on the clock, the last 20 of O’Connor’s 150 biology students transmit their answers to the fraternal twin question projected on the screen at the front of the auditorium. When the clock hits zero, a collective sigh rises in the room as a colorful bar graph appears on the screen: the highest bar stands above option E (“the number is highly variable”); the next tallest bar appears over option C (“50 percent [of the genes]”). O’Connor smiles and shakes her head. “Close, but no cigar,” she says. The answer is “C,” as 40 percent of the class had correctly surmised. Like any pair of siblings, O’Connor explains, fraternal twins share 50 percent of their genes. “You share half of your genes with each of your siblings—it’s just a different 50 percent in each case.”

During her 75-minute class, she would go on to ask a total of eight questions, posing the last one in the period’s final two minutes. “I promise you I will give you problems like these on your next test,” she says, as her students close their notebooks and laptops and stand up to leave. “Send me an e-mail if you want to talk about any of these,” she says, shutting down her own laptop computer. “My virtual classroom door is always open.”

Read more by Cara Feinberg