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N S Soundar Rajan talks about a novel teaching approach to bring about a paradigm shift in learning

‘Lectures are only successful at helping students pass exams, not to understand the subject,’ says Professor Eric Mazur, a leading physicist from Harvard University. He further avers that lectures can only succeed in promoting genuine learning if they contain questions which require students to apply their understanding. The learned professor has gone about to evolve the Peer Instruction methodology, a radical one, to create a classroom ambiance to promote genuine understanding of the concepts by the students.

Dr. Mazur’s Peer Instruction methodology promotes real learning by the lecturer stepping out of the limelight and encouraging peer discussion — a technique which can be used even in large lectures. Unlike traditional teaching which focuses completely on information transfer, Peer Instruction, replaces the information transfer by reading assignments. The emphasis is on helping the students better assimilate the material by teaching each other, leveraging the knowledge that’s present among the students, at least among some of them, already.

How is this implemented? After the reading assignment, the teacher places before the class a set of  questions. The teacher asks the first question, and then ask them to turn to their neighbour to try to convince their neighbour of their answer. During this discussion, the students who have a better grasp of the material convince those who do not. That’s where the ‘peer’ and the ‘instruction’ comes from.

There are two great and genuine advantages in this type of instruction, one — no student can remain passive as every few minutes his or her neighbour would start mulling and talking. And, two, there is a continuous feedback from the student to the instructor and also from the students to themselves because they can see how they are performing in comparison to the rest of the class. As you can see Peer Instruction involves students in their own learning during a lecture and also stay focused as lectures are interspersed with conceptual questions.

The real strength of the Peer Instruction methodology are the ConcepTests. These one question assessment items are designed to allow the students to determine their own understanding of the conceptual foundations of the material.

Additionally, there can be a number of quiz questions that can be used at the beginning of class. These can also be provided online to encourage students to come to the class prepared.  The ConcepTests are designed to expose common difficulties in understanding the material. The students are given one to two minutes to think about the question and formulate their own answers; they then spend two to three minutes discussing their answers in groups of three to four, attempting to reach consensus on the correct answer.

This process forces the students to think through the arguments being developed, and enables them (as well as the instructor) to assess their understanding of the concepts even before they leave the classroom. The instructor too is helped to determine the overall class understanding of an idea or a concept so that he or she can decide whether to spend more time covering the concept or not.

Peer Instruction is easy to implement in almost any subject and class. It doesn’t require retooling of entire courses or curricula, or significant expenditures of time or money. All that is required is the willingness to develop ConcepTests and spend some of the class time on student discussion. Concept test questions often describe a problem, event, or situation. Examples of appropriate types of questions include:

*Asking students to predict the outcome of an event (e.g., What would happen in this experiment? How would changing one variable affect others?) 

*Asking students to apply rules or principles to new situations (e.g., Which concept is relevant here? How would you apply it?)

*Asking students to solve a problem using a known equation or select a procedure to complete a new task (e.g., What procedure would be appropriate to solve this problem?)
Concept tests can be used in a number of different ways. Some instructors use them at the beginning of class to gauge students’ understanding of readings or homework. Some use them intermittently in the class to test students’ comprehension. Based on how well students perform, the instructor may decide to move on in the lecture or pause to review a difficult concept.

Another method is to give students the chance to respond to a question individually, then put them in pairs or small groups to compare and discuss their answers. After a short period of time, the students vote again for the answer they think is correct. This gives students the opportunity to articulate their reasoning for a particular answer.

Prof Mazur has taught at two different levels of introductory physics at Harvard using the Peer Instruction strategy. This has resulted in his students making significant gains in conceptual understanding (as measured by standardised tests) as well as gaining problem solving skills comparable to those acquired in traditionally taught classes. Many other instructors at several other institutions have also implemented Peer Instruction with their own students and found similar results.

Eric Mazur is Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard  since 1982. His engaging talk ‘Confessions of a Converted Lecturer’ can be viewed on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI. The abstract of this talk reads: “I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorising information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonising conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail!...”

Prof  Mazur has also published a book called Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual, Prentice Hall, 1997, which provides details on the strategy he used to help students learn physics concepts. The same strategy can be applied to teach any other subject under the sun, he says. 

For more details on his novel teaching methodology, log on to Prof Eric Mazur’s website hosted at http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/

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