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GREENSBORO — The day started routinely for students in John Lepri’s human physiology class.

They filed into the auditorium of UNCG’s Sullivan Science Building on a recent Wednesday morning and walked to the front of the room to collect their graded quizzes.

But Lepri didn’t begin lecturing at the stroke of 8 a.m.

Instead, he told the 240-student class, “Let’s go straight to a clicker question.”

It may be a large lecture hall, but Lepri can pretty much guarantee there won’t be a lot of napping or texting. He keeps students awake using audience-response systems, or “clickers.”

With the click of a button, the wireless, remote control-sized devices let Lepri know not only who is in class but who is participating.

“I really see a lot more going on in the back half of the classroom,” he said after class.

Ian Beatty, a UNCG physics professor who has done research on clickers, said the devices have been around for nearly 20 years. But the use of clickers is growing steadily, Beatty said. They are becoming mainstream on college campuses and popular in K-12 schools, he said.

“They’re a very powerful tool for teaching,” Beatty said. “It provides an additional way to communicate with students.”

Lepri has used clickers for a couple of years and requires his students to buy them. They’re less than $40 at the student bookstore, he said.

Students register the devices online, which lets Lepri keep up with who is — and isn’t — clicking.

The devices vary, but the clickers used by Lepri’s students are simple. They have buttons labeled A through E, and students click the appropriate button to answer multiple-choice questions that Lepri displays on the screen.

It’s to a student’s credit to click. Lepri offers points that figure into final grades — half a point just for clicking, a full point for clicking the correct answer.

A counter on the screen shows how many students have answered, and the time left for them to do so.

“For a class this large, it makes sense, attendance-wise,” said 21-year old Alexis Scotece about using the devices. “It’s nice to see what you chose, what everybody else chose. It’s interesting.”

The topic on this day was cardiovascular functions, and Lepri interspersed questions throughout his lecture: What is Lance Armstrong’s resting heart rate, and where does the heart rate originate in a normal person?

Lepri didn’t like students’ answers to the latter question. He encouraged the class to discuss it among themselves and give it another shot.

This time, 124 of the students who clicked correctly answered “the right atrium.”

“I like that a lot better,” Lepri told them. “I hope if you changed your answer, it was in the right direction.”

Lepri said he encourages discussion when he is dissatisfied with the responses.

And that is one of the clicker’s strongest virtues, Beatty said. When used well, the clicker encourages interaction, supports good discussion and engages students with the material they are learning.

“I will learn a lot about what they do or do not understand, and they will learn a lot from the interaction,” Beatty said, adding that students can learn more from discussing with each other than from listening to him lecture.

Beatty said clickers help larger classes function like smaller ones, and they can be useful in any discipline.

He keeps a case full of them at the door for students to pick up as they arrive for class.

“I would rather give up my whiteboard than give up my clickers,” he said.

Ali McKay favors the clickers she used while a student at UNC-Chapel Hill. Those had letters and numbers that allowed students to respond to more complex questions, not just multiple choice.

But using the devices in class is beneficial, McKay said. “It makes you study as you go along,” so you’ll be able to answer the questions correctly, the 22-year-old said.

Lepri is pleased. Clickers have made his class more lively, he said.

“Especially at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

Contact Jonnelle Davis at 373-7080 or jonnelle.davis@news-record.com