Hand-held electronic devices called clickers are helping college students learn physics better, according to a series of research studies conducted at Ohio State University. Clickers, also known as "student response systems (SRS)," are wireless devices that resemble small calculators. In "clicker classes," multiple choice questions appear on a large screen at the front of the lecture hall. Students "click" their answers based on their understanding of the part of the lecture just given. A computer registers all student responses, and a bar graph shows the percentage of students voting for each answer.
Students at the university who used the devices to answer multiple-choice questions during physics lectures earned final exam scores that were about 10 percentage points higher - the equivalent of a full-letter grade - than students who didn't use clickers. The clickers also appear to level the playing field between male and female students. In clicker classes, male and female students performed equally well. In the traditional non-clicker classes, male students outperformed their female counterparts. According to researchers, the results suggest that clickers could potentially encourage more women to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines.
Source: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/clickers.htm