Educator Highlight

Every day we hear about new and innovative ways our customers are integrating response technology into their classrooms. These stories were so good we just couldn’t keep them to ourselves. That's why we developed our "Educator Highlights."

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Q&A With Dr. Eric Mazur

We recently sat down with Dr. Eric Mazur for a one-on-one Q&A at our National User Conference. Check out what he had to say about Peer Instruction and Student Response.

Dr. Eric Mazur
Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics
Harvard University

Question: Describe the basic principles behind Peer Instruction.

Dr. Mazur: If you think of education as being a two step process - one is the transfer of information and two is assimilating that information - I think we’d all agree that the second step is significantly harder than the first, especially since you can get information everywhere. However, traditional teaching focuses completely on information transfer. With Peer Instruction, the information transfer is moved out of the classroom and replaced 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.

After the reading assignment, I come to class with a set of questions. I ask the first question, poll the students and then ask them to turn to their neighbor to try to convince their neighbor 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. I then re-poll them and the cycle repeats.

There are two benefits to this type of instruction. One is you can’t sleep through class because every few minutes your neighbor will start talking to you. Two, there is 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.

Question: What results have you seen from implementing Peer Instruction in your classes?

Dr. Mazur: I implemented Peer Instruction because I was not satisfied with how my students performed on certain types of assessment instruments that look for conceptual understanding. In fact, they did very poorly. After implementing Peer Instruction I saw vast gains in the amount of learning that took place in my class: the gain first doubled and eventually even tripled. Most importantly, traditional problem solving improved as well.

Question: Do you have any tips or suggestions for institutions that may want to implement Peer Instruction in their courses?

Dr. Mazur: I think that the first step is to convince oneself that there is a need to implement any change. In general, if professors receive good evaluations and students do well on the exams, why even consider changing? Step one is make sure that you’re using an assessment that actually tells you what you need to know. I found out that even though my students were giving me high ratings and were doing well on the exam, they could not address what I considered to be very simple questions on a conceptual survey. Why? Because they were just plugging and chugging on the exams. They had no basic conceptual understanding of the material I tried to teach them. That’s what actually prompted me to look for ways of improving my teaching. So I think step one is convince yourself there is a need to change. If there’s no need to do so, nobody’s going to implement anything.

The second is that it will require some work, of course. You have to adjust your approach to teaching. You have to adjust what you’re going to do in class. It’s a shift in mental model of how teaching takes place. It can be quite a bit of work if you start in a completely new field. However, more and more people are implementing Peer Instruction. So a good first resource is to look for other people in your field who are implementing Peer Instruction. A simple web search will yield questions that you can use in your class or at least the names of colleagues who might be able to supply you with materials.

Question: How have student response systems helped with Peer Instruction?

Dr. Mazur: Well in the sense, student response systems, or “clickers” as they are often called, have lowered the threshold for implementing Peer Instruction. As you may know, I was one of the original developers of student response systems because I wanted to automate the collection of data. I think there are two benefits over a simple show of hand. First, you end up with a permanent record so you have data and the data allows you to assess whether or not the question you used was effective or not. Secondly, you can give students some incentive for participation in those questions. I think those are two very important benefits of student response systems.

I have also noticed that for a lot of faculty who have not thought about this type of approach to teaching technology is a way to get them interested in pedagogy — I am talking about the instructors who think technology is cool and innovative even without thinking about pedagogy or implementation details. If they adopt the student response systems they soon realize that the pedagogy matters too. Therefore student response systems provide a way of focusing faculty on data and ways to improve teaching.

Question: Any final words?

Dr. Mazur: It’s very important to motivate the students because students will resist change. One of the ways to do this is to put conceptual questions that are very similar to the conceptual ones asked in class on the examinations. If you ask all these conceptual questions in class and then the exam is just a traditional plug and chug type of exam, students are not going to be very happy. So I give an exam very early on in the term — maybe as early as week three when I’ve barely covered the beginnings. That first exam has lots of conceptual questions. After the exam the students come back to me and say, “Professor Mazur, can we do more conceptual questions in class?” So, in addition to motivating the faculty, motivating the students is also very important.