Adapting Visual Response System Teaching Technology to the Conventional Classroom

The Visual Response System (VRS) is a specially constructed resource room in which high rates of active student response and virtually immediate feedback for those responses can be achieved. Eight to ten student desks are arranged in a horseshoe configuration with the teacher's desk at the open end. Each student responds to every Instructional item (by writing, placing an object, pointing, etc.) directly on the stage of an overhead projector built into the desk. Research has shown the VRS to be an effective instructional technology for teaching a wide range of skills to various student populations. The three most powerful instructional features of the VRS are active student response, immediate feedback, and student-student interaction. Since the implementation of a full-scale VRS classroom with its hardware and space requirements may be too costly for many schools, and since an operating VRS classroom would still be able to serve only a portion of the many students needing more effective instruction each day, this article describes a number of inexpensive, practical techniques for adapting the instructional features of the VRS to the conventional classroom.