Abstract:

Students’ engagement is an essential factor that contributes to the achievement of educational learning outcomes in providing knowledge and skills to students. Factors that may influence students’ engagement can be categorized into individual perceived variable which includes personal characteristics and motivation and educational practices which include structural and learning environment. An effective learning environment will lead to better student perceptions of the course and also better engagement with courses.
Classroom response system (CRS) or widely known as ‘Clickers’ is one of the teaching and learning technologies that are used to enhance classroom based education. The clicker system lets students to respond to a question or poll and allow instructors to collect record and display information gathered from the learning session, which provides a quick feedback on the voting or polling session. These instant feedbacks are not only good for instructors to initiate further discussion but also encouraged students to think and make decisions in class as well as improving their engagement in their learning process. Clickers have been widely used in many higher educational institutions, mostly in developed countries. Although, there are researches conducted on the impact of using Clickers in students learning process, very few are implemented and conducted in the Electronic Engineering courses.

A quasi-experimental research was designed to conduct an initial study to observe the impact of implementing Clickers in an Electronic Devices course towards students’ engagement in class Conceptual questions were designed to assess their conceptual understanding of topics in the course. Students were required to use Clickers to answer multiple choice concept tests at the end of each topic chapter. Students’ engagement were measured from three different components; behaviour, emotion and cognitive that are placed randomly in the questionnaire list. A set of questionnaires were developed to investigate the impact of using Clickers on students’ engagement from students' perspectives. Students' achievements were also compared between the target group and the control groups using a standard test.

The students' attitude surveys revealed that students enjoyed the use of clickers in their learning process. Comparing the three elements of engagement which are behavioural, cognitive and emotional, it was found that the use of Clickers has the highest impact on students' behavioural engagement. It encourages them to participate in group discussions, stay attentive and improves in understanding concepts better. Applying this technology as a learning tool in classroom has also improved students' cognitive and emotional engagement, moderately. These results prove that using Clickers does have an impact in improving students' engagement in their learning process. It helps to initiate learning process in a surface level to get students more interested for deeper learning. However, improvement in academic achievement was not statistically significant in the target group when compared to the control group. As an initial study in the Electronics Engineering field, these findings indicate that the implementation of Clickers do have a significant and positive impact toward students engagement, especially in their behavioural engagement.

Keywords:

Student engagement, class response system, clickers.