ABSTRACT
Classroom response technologies work through a combination of executive attention, social engagement, and rapid, meaningful feedback. The first thing that effective use of classroom response technologies does is to bring learners’ executive networks to attention by engaging them in a decision. Innovative uses of clickers can drive social engagement, scaffolding students into the habits of group work. Operating together, these basic lessons in educational psychology can help to think through cases of clicker use, and toward new uses of classroom response technologies as the technologies grow. Significant research has shown that, besides intuition and years of experience, attention is vital to learning. Although a lack of individual-level feedback can be a drawback of CRSs, group learning and peer tutoring have helped some groups and disciplines to turn this drawback into a benefit. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky has been particularly influential regarding the integration of different contexts of learning.
