THE artful worm has slithered off the TV screen and into universities, where academics are evaluating its performance in making lectures more interactive.

As the number of students in lectures increases, universities are adopting hand-held devices that work in a similar fashion to Channel Nine's election worm, to ensure every student actively participates.

The University of Western Sydney is about to conclude an 18-month trial of the technology - known as a "student response units" - in select disciplines, which will likely result in it being rolled out to the rest of the university.

Roy Tasker, a chemistry lecturer in the school of natural sciences, said the devices were particularly useful in boosting participation among international students who were shy speaking English. Each student is given a machine like a calculator with numbered keys that allow them to punch in their answers to his multiple choice questions. Their responses are then transmitted to his laptop.

"It's very simple but extremely powerful," Associate Professor Tasker said. "When everybody's voted, I click on a button and up comes a bar graph showing the distribution of figures. The beauty about it is it's confidential, because a big problem with putting hands up is they turn around and see what the smartest student in the class is doing."

A computing lecturer at Macquarie University, Debbie Richards, said she had been using the technology for three years, and had encouraged her university to introduce it across the campus. "One advantage is the lecturers knowing what the students know before exam time, when it's really too late," Associate Professor Richards said.

The University of New England is running its own trial, but was still determining whether it was education or entertainment, said the learning and teaching centre's Belinda Tynan. Dr Tynan baulked at comparing the devices to the election worm, saying that many academics had feared it would be used to measure their performance, which was not the case.

Its wider adaptation would depend on its effectiveness and price, which ranges from $40 per student for a basic device for multiple choice answers to several hundred dollars for ones that allow students to type out answers, Dr Tynan said.