Students' Attitudes towards Plickers in Undergraduate Calculus Course

Abstract

In university education, lecturers often adopt didactic lectures in undergraduate calculus classes. This method has been judged for making students passive recipients of calculus knowledge who cannot construct their own knowledge of the discipline. One way to make didactic lecture more interactive and engaging in calculus class is to encourage lecturers to integrate elements such as visual aids, real-life examples, stories or anecdotes, questions and discussion, and interactive technologies like polls or quizzes into calculus teaching. One interactive technology currently gaining ground in higher education is Plickers. Plickers is a relatively new audience response system (ARS) tool that allows a lecturer to collect real-time feedback from students using a mobile app and paper-based cards to inform instruction. This study investigated students' attitudes towards Plickers as a low-cost pedagogical tool to foster active learning in an undergraduate calculus course. A quantitative approach within the scheme of a cross-sectional survey design was adopted and primary data relating to attitudes towards Plickers were collected with a valid and reliable instrument tagged Attitudes towards Plickers in Calculus Scale (ATPCS, Cronbach's alpha Coefficient =0.96) from 336 undergraduate calculus students. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean, standard deviation, percentage, and frequency and inferential statistics of an independent samples t-test. Results revealed that all the students had positive attitudes towards Plickers in calculus instruction. Additionally, there was a significant influence of gender on calculus students' attitudes towards Plickers in favour of the females (t[subscript (2, 334)] = -2.89, p=0.004). The findings showed that when implemented effectively, Plickers helped to sustain and improve students' attitudes in calculus instruction. This study recommended the adoption of Plickers as a low-cost alternative to the deficiencies inherent in didactic lecture.