active learning in lecture courses

I decided to follow up on the idea of making lectures more interactive (Ch. 5 in Bain's book - "How Do They Conduct Class?"). I read through Mazur's Peer Instruction, which is deceptively long, but the majority of the book contains questions for Physics instructors to use for ConcepTests. The ConcepTest is Mazur's way of injecting interactivity into his lecture courses by presenting students with a multiple-choice question, giving them a minute to think about the answer by themselves, and then recording their answers. Then they turn to a classmate to discuss their answers -- Mazur also calls this the convince-your-neighbor approach, since this process is particularly relevant if two students have different answers and/or one student may be more uncertain about an answer than the other. Therefore the uncertain student would be more inclined to change his/her answer. After a short discussion period, students then report their answers again, which may or may not have been revised based on the discussion. Mazur found a significant increase in correct answers after peer instruction, if the original (pre- peer instruction) poll yielded about 35-70% correct answers. He has found that this result extends beyond Harvard students (his own student population), with instructors at high schools, community colleges, and large and small schools all reporting similar results.

The peer discussions are especially helpful in exposing misunderstandings in reasoning, and hearing classmates describe and explain the concepts in their own words -- versus seasoned instructors that may have lost touch with the difficulty of learning a particular concept when teaching it -- seems to make a greater impact in the learning process. Mazur also goes around the classroom to listen in on these discussions, which gives him additional feedback on where students might be tripping up on their conceptual understanding. He uses the repeat-when-necessary approach, i.e. going over material again if there are mostly incorrect answers after the peer instruction period.

Mazur and colleagues have a number of papers on the peer instruction method, including a review of ten years of data using this method. Other papers can be accessed at Mazur Group's website.

The peer instruction method can be implemented into teaching most subjects and integrated with using Personal Response Systems (PRS). Mazur uses a series of mini-presentations within his courses as a lead-in to his ConcepTests. The short lecture format combined with the ConcepTests help to keep students' attention and engage them in the material.

How does this all relate to what Bain discussed? Bain mentioned that getting students to talk in class is key -- not just talking for talking's sake, but productive talking that allows students to engage with ideas and think aloud about what they're trying to learn. He also stated that students seem to learn best when presented with authentic problems of an honorific quality, as opposed to busy work. Overall, instigating discussion within a lecture makes students feel more like active participants in their own learning rather than merely being received knowers.