Tomorrow's Professor Msg. #155 FURTHER COMMENTS ON PEER INSTRUCTION

Folks:
I have received numerous - very positive - responses to posting #149 on
Eric Masur's Peer Instruction apporoach. Below is a message from Professor
Mazur about a survey he and his colleagues are conducting on the use of
this method at colleges and universities around the world. I've also
included some of the comments I received in response to Message #141, thus
the extra length of this posting.

Regards,
Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Ethical Principles in University Teaching

------------------- 1,940 words ------------------
FURTHER COMMENTS ON PEER INSTRUCTION

Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 14:04:59 -0400
From: Eric Mazur <mazur@physics.harvard.edu>

Dear Rick,

Many thanks for your kind "advertisement" of Peer Instruction in
Tomorrow's Professor 149 (which I read religiously and recommend to many
-- thanks for this great service!).

Your message was very timely as we are in the middle of carrying out a
"Peer Instruction Implementation Survey" to see what other people (in
other fields as well) are doing. We sent out some 2,700 questionnaires
and to date we have received some 700 questionnaires back. It will take
us many, many months to analyze all the results, but I thought you might
be interested in the initial "impression" of the survey responses
appended below.

If you would like to advertise the survey
(http://galileo.harvard.edu/pisurvey.html) or give an impression of some
of the demographics/responses please do. The only caveat applies to the
(splendid!) quotes at the bottom -- I have not yet obtained any
permission to use these quotes.

Please keep in touch (and let me know what responses you get to TP149!).
Best wishes,
Eric Mazur

WORLD-WIDE SURVEY OF PEER INSTRUCTION USERS

Mazur's group has recently embarked on a world-wide survey of users of
his teaching method. A 45-minute questionnaire was sent to a list of
2,750 recipients. This list was compiled from: 1. the registered users of
Project Galileo, 2. authors citing Peer Instruction on the web or in
print, 3. people who have contacted either Prentice Hall or Mazur
directly regarding Peer Instruction.

To date, the survey has been answered by 680 people from all over the
world, from a broad range of institution types, and wide variety of
disciplines (see below for details). Respondents range from a Nobel
laureate (Leon Lederman) to high school teachers, from people primarily
interested in research to people primarily interested in teaching, from
people just starting their teaching career to people close to retirement.

The respondents are overwhelmingly positive about their experience with
Peer Instruction: 87% have a positive experience, 8% is somewhat mixed,
fewer than 5% had negative experiences with Peer Instruction. About
25-30% of instructors did some sort of formal assessment to quantify the
effect of their teaching with Peer Instruction. Nearly all of these
instructors find a marked improvement on students' performance on
standard assessment instruments after introduction of Peer Instruction,
confirming Mazur's published results.

Some demographic details:

By country: 520 from the United States, 28 from Canada, and 16 from
Australia. But also from Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands,
Spain, Sweden, Belgium, Argentina, Germany, Israel, Peru, the
Philippines, Austria, Chile, China, Columbia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, Greece,
Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, South
Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela

By institution type: 399 from universities, 113 from 4-year colleges, 48
from high schools, 19 from 2-year colleges, 18 from community colleges, 5
from middle or elementary schools, and 2 from trade/vocational schools.

By discipline: 463 use Peer Instruction for physics and engineering, 47
for chemistry, 37 for biological and environmental sciences, 24 for
astronomy, 9 for mathematics, 7 for education, 5 for earth science, 4 for
health and medicine, 3 for computer science, 3 for management, 1 for
english, and 1 for philosophy.

By interest: 97 solely education, 223 primarily education, 228 education
and research, 42 primarily research

SOME QUOTES FROM THE SURVEY (Identies surpressed since permission to
publish not yet obtained - R. Reis).

"Peer Instruction is the best technique for teaching a large class I have
used." - physics, midwestern U.S. university

"Best new introduction into my course in years. Far more important than
any technological innovation." - astrophysics, private research university

"Probably the most enjoyable teaching experiences I have had have
involved Peer Instruction." - engineering, small public university

"A method [Peer Instruction] that is great fun and well worth a try. It
was shown to me as something simple that we ought to do to improve our
teaching. Although a little sceptical at first I am now a convert!"
science, Australian university

"Peer Instruction's strongest point, in my opinion, is the change in
class atmosphere. Everything is less stiff, the students are not afraid
to ask questions because their feared 'stupidity' has already been shared
with others. Also, the instructor's explanations fall on fertile ground
because they have just struggled with the concepts." (Physics & Astronomy,
southern U.S. university)

"I can only suggest that ANYONE involved in teaching almost any subject
could profit from trying Peer Instruction - as you can guess I am a
convert!!" (University in England)

"I will certainly continue [using Peer Instruction]. The level of student
satisfaction/involvement in this last class was the highest I have ever
experienced (in 30 years of university teaching)." (Large Canadian university)

"Suggestion: try it ! Recommendation: try it !! Warning: you might get
hooked to this teaching style !!!" ( Large Canadian university)
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COMMENTS FROM TP MAILING LIST SUBSCRIBERS TO POSTING #149 PEER INSTRUCTION -
ERIC MAZUR

I saw your posting yesterday about Eric Mazur's teaching.

I'd be curious to know the cite for the Journal of American
Physics article that prompted his revisions *and* the cite
for a paper describing his "famous experiment" that led him
to change his teaching methods. If you could provide either
cites I'd appreciate it.

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for posting that.

Joe Brady
MIS Instructor
University of Delaware
bradyj@be.udel.edu
----------

As an undergrad at the University of Utah, I had a freshman physics
instructor who took the exact approach described here. This would have been
Winter, 1996, and the instructor's name was Dr. Price, although I'm not
sure how helpful that would be in locating him, as I'm not even reasonably
certain that he still teaches here at UofU.

I enjoyed the technique, far more than I had enjoyed his lecturing style of the
previous semester. During the periods in which we were to convince our
classmates of our reasoning, I was on the "right side" often enough to give
me confidence in my own understanding of the material. In fact, I think it
was this point in my life at which I realized that I enjoy "teaching" -
that is, explaining new or poorly-understood concepts using well-understood
language and examples. It wasn't until the following year that I began to
think I might be good enough at it to make a worthwhile career out of it,
but now (just about finished with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science),
I am very strongly considering graduate school, and making a career out of
1) (computer) scientific research and 2) teaching, hopefully combining
these two loves by becoming a University Professor.

Tommy Knowlton
University of Utah - Computer Science Department
----------

I started using a casual version of Eric Mazur's techniques in the middle
of the quarter in physics 61, the advanced freshman mechanics class here at
Stanford. The conceptual questions really focus the class's attention, and
they're a great reality check for me in the middle of a lecture. Most of
the example questions in Mazur's book were relatively easy
confidence-builders for my class, so I generally picked the most subtle
questions from his book or made up my own.

The proportion of correct answers always went way up after the
convince-your-neighbor part of the exercise, except for once when the class
was divided evenly between the "right" answer and one "wrong" answer. I
was a little disappointed as I explained the "right" answer, and I could
see that some of the students looked pretty confused, but it was the end of
class. Walking back to my office, I suddenly realized that there was a
hidden assumption in the question, and if you didn't make that assumption,
then the "wrong" answer was actually correct. That made a great beginning
for the next class.

I don't like using a show of hands to vote for the answer. There were a
few people in the class who were quite exceptional even in this class, and
some of the students had a tendency to wait and see how they voted before
raising their hands. Also, I'd really like to have the numerical votes
project automatically on the screen. I wish we had the technology for
anonymous multiple-choice voting in the TC-SEQ lecture halls. Is this
anything the Learning Lab might set up in the future??

This fall I'll use this technique more systematically from the beginning of the
quarter. I'm also going to have the students predict the results of the
demos to help them internalize those concepts and to make the demos more
meaningful.

Kam
Kathryn A Moler
Stanford University
----------

I tried Mazur's ConcepTest idea as a TA giving a guest lecture
in an introductory astronomy class, and I've also used the "convince
your neighbors" strategy with discussion-section quizzes. It's definitely
more fun for the instructor than just lecturing away, and seems to
promote a good sense of camaraderie among the students. I'm looking
forward to trying these methods more extensively in the future.

By the way, Mazur has a nice website devoted to peer instruction
and other education issues:
http://mazur-www.harvard.edu/Education/EducationMenu.html. He has a link
to the Project Galileo site (http://galileo.harvard.edu), where you can
find pointers to growing libraries of ConcepTests on topics in physics,
chemistry, astronomy, and biology.

Thanks for an informative listserv!
Jennifer Hoffman
UW-Madison Astronomy
----------

I was treated to an approach similar to this in a nonscience class this
summer. It was a combination undergraduate/graduate class with a lot of
deep readings. The professor broke us up into groups of about 5 people.
Each day we would come in, sit together and discuss our readings. Peer
pressure was effective in encouraging us to read the assignment. In our
groups we discussed and listed questions we had about vocabulary and
content. We did this for about 15 - 25 minutes. The class would then come
together and the professor discussed each groups' questions. There were 30
students in the class.

This was valuable to me because the readings became central as opposed to
supplementary. Also each student's questions were heard and answered
either by peers or the prof.

Ruth S Leonard
University of Georgia
rleonard@coe.uga.edu
-----------

Just to let you know that I am one of those deeply impressed by Mazur's
method -- I have in fact implemented it at Rice University for my
introductory physics course. The results are quite encouraging. I believe
that his method or variations are used by quite a few (20-50) schools for
their introductory physics courses and in fact there is now hardware
available to record responses and generate histograms -- I purchased some
this summer and will be using it for the course this fall.

Incidentally: Thanks for the 'Tomorrow's Prof.' mailing list. I bought your
book this summer -- at the Stanford bookstore -- subscribed to the listserv
almost immediately, and think it is an excellent resource.

Regards,
Arjendu Pattanayak
---------

I was very interested (and pleasantly surprised) to see the Tomorrow's
Professor message on Peer Instruction.

I'm a graduate student with Eric Mazur and one of the things I'm working on
is a survey of Peer Instruction users. We're trying to be as comprehensive
in reaching PI users as possible in order to learn of their experiences
with Peer Instruction (and similar forms of collaborative learning). In
addition to getting information about the actual usage of Peer Instruction
(which actually seems even more widespread than we had anticipated), we
hope to link PI users together and encourage them to participate in our
ConcepTest database. We will also be putting together a "Transplantation
Guide" for users and potential users that will discuss implementation
issues, hints and suggestions gathered from our survey response.

To date, we've had nearly 700 instructors respond to our survey (available
on the Web at <http://galileo.harvard.edu/PIsurvey.html>), with additional
responses (and names of other PI users) every day.

Anyway, since you posed a question at the bottom of the Tomorrow's
Professor message inquiring about Peer Instruction users, I thought some of
your readers might respond to you. And we were wondering if it might be
possible for you to let us know of anyone who you know uses Peer
Instruction so that we can be sure to include them in our study.

Thanks very much.

Adam Fagen
Harvard University
---------

The note on "peer instruction" was forwarded to me by a colleague in my
department. I'm not sure whether your question at the end of your mail was
rhetorical or not, but I have used a variation on "peer instruction" for
several years in my transportation engineering classes and use of
seemingly-related techniques dates back some time. I have converted all of
my classes (max size about 40) to a "discussion question" based method of
instruction. I give my classes sets of discussion questions (DQs) well in
advance of "lecture." The answers to the DQs are generally found in the text
or assigned readings but sometimes require other reading or simply thinking
about the topic. The "lectures" then proceed with called-upon students
answering the questions--sometimes this is very straightforward (a simple
right/wrong answer) and sometimes not (e.g., something about transportation
policy). Students are often asked to elaborate on their answers (i.e.,
further probing beyond a simple answer). Other students are asked to
respond to the first "answer" and defense of position, arguing of different
perspectives, and so on goes from there. If there is a particularly
confusing topic, further elaboration on my part is done. Participation in
the class is graded. Student response to this approach is generally
positive although there is a small minority who would prefer what they refer
to as "regular" lectures--i.e., I talk and write, they listen. I started
using this approach in graduate classes and have since incorporated it into
classes at all levels--including an experimental freshman design class.

If you would like to have any other information on the approach that I use,
I would be pleased to share it with you.

Rick Lyles
Professor and Associate Chairperson
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Michigan State University