Evaluating Students’ Perceptions of Interactive Response System (IRS): Extending Technology Acceptance Model

Introduction

Intel Teaching Program (Intel, 2007), founded by Intel Foundation and sponsored by Microsoft and HP, is a teaching program that instructs teachers to apply information technology in the traditional classroom. The program had trained over 3300 primary and secondary teachers in American during 1998 and 1999. Due to the outstanding achievement, Intel decided to significantly expand the program in 2000 and planed to reach 13 million teachers in more than 40 countries – and their one billion students by 2011. This program proves the fact that technology is a powerful tool to help students develop and strengthen the skills in succeeding in the global economy.

Making students more active participants rather than passive listeners promotes the effective learning (Chou, 2003). The use of technology is able to foster interaction and lead to a better and more effective learning (Evans & Sabry, 2003). Oral questioning and answering is the most common way for the interaction in the classroom. This traditional method which relies on hand-raising or volunteered responses to questions always only secures responses from a small group of more outspoken students (Slain et al., 2004). Two streams of the technology have been used to improve this issue: “off-line” technology and “on-line” technology. The former provides learner autonomy for students to study by their own outside the classroom, such as podcasting (Campbell, 2005; Frydenberg, 2008), Wiki (Watson et al., 2008), open source software (Watson et al., 2008), web-based systems (Preiser-Houy & Navarrete, 2006). The latter which can be called IRS (Interactive Response System)(Slain et al., 2004) enables students interact with the designed material and get feedback instantly in a classroom setting, such as Student Response System (Horowitz, 2003), Classroom Communication System (Abrahamson, 1999), EduClick (Liu et al., 2003). To facilitate the interaction in the classroom, IRS is getting popular in the campus and it calls the need of this study.

The typical IRS includes a computer attached with a radio signal receiver, particular software, a projector, a screen and personal hand-held devices that are controlled by students to respond to the provided questions. Compared to “off-line” technology, IRS has the advantages: (a) it facilitates active learning because all students are able to answer questions anonymously without dread of ridicule or mistake; (b) it increases the interaction and interests due to it provides a game-like atmosphere; (c) instructors are able to assess students’ comprehension and take remedial measures instantly; (d) it improves students’ attendance (Slain et al., 2004; Siau et al., 2006; Dujuan & Jing, 2009).

However, most research on IRS focused on the IRS performance (Slain et al., 2004), interactivity created by IRS (Siau et al., 2006; Liu et al., 2003) and case study (Horowitz, 2003). Little research has engaged in the exploration of how students feel regarding to using IRS, and less solid models have been established to depict students’ behaviors systematically. Thus, the purpose of this research is to: (a) build a model to formulate students’ perceptions, attitudes and actionable feedback toward using IRS by extending TAM; (b) provide the suggestions of teaching strategy for instructors while applying IRS in a classroom setting. Theoretically, the study links TAM, user satisfaction and actionable feedback (recommend other to use) to form an intact model. This model fully examines the role of the IT artifact and brings more IT research streams. Practically, the results can improve the performance of introducing IRS into the classroom.