Streamline Training & Documentation: Really Believing Your Physics Prof

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Really Believing Your Physics Prof

Since he began teaching at Harvard in 1984, Eric Mazur, a professor of physics and of applied physics, has made a major change in his teaching approach, a change that he is industriously sharing with the wider world. Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times interviewed Mazur for the July 18 edition of the paper.

Mazur told Dreifus of his dismay some years back at finding that his students, even those who did fine on tests, weren't really assimilating the concepts he was teaching. It was as though they didn't actually believe him when what he taught diverged from their layperson's understanding of how the natural world works. Once their beginning physics course was over, many would revert to their mistaken concepts rather than retaining what they had learned.

On his own website, Mazur has a section devoted to his ongoing investigation of how best to teach physics.¹ It's notable how closely Mazur's teaching techniques match best practice for adult learning as conceived for business training. Mazur addresses:

Peer instruction — "Peer Instruction actively engages the students in their own learning. Carefully chosen questions (ConcepTests) give students the opportunity to discover and correct their misunderstandings of the material, and, in the process, learn the key ideas of physics from one another."

Gender and physics — "Analysis suggests that Peer Instruction, when coupled with other activities which also engage students actively in the learning process, does indeed narrow the gender gap."

Classroom demonsrations — "If students are required to predict the outcome of a demonstration and discuss their predictions with one another before the demonstration, they think more actively about the demonstration and its explanation, and have opportunities to discover inconsistencies or weaknesses in their own thinking. We are studying whether this strategy improves student understanding of the demonstration."

Technology and education — "In collaboration with other innovators in education we are working on integrating the ILT [Interactive Learning Toolkit] with a fully interactive classroom system that can use a broad variety of devices, from infrared 'clickers', to cellular phones, to wireless PDAs and laptops. The goal is to combine a server-based course and content management system with a laptop-based interactive classroom."

In Mazur's view (and that of enlightened colleagues around the world),

... education is so much more than the mere transfer of information. The information has to be assimilated. Students have to connect the information to what they already know, develop mental models, learn how to apply the new knowledge, and how to adapt this knowledge to new and unfamiliar situations.²

Feedback indicates that students appreciate Mazur's efforts to make learning stick. As one junior said this past semester, "He takes responsibility that every student learn."³

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¹ Mazur provides an account here of his recognition of the problem with traditional teaching of physics. Mazur cites the work of David Hestenes, now professor of physics emeritus at Arizona State University, as an inspiration. Mazur first encountered Hestenes' pedagogical work in 1990. Hestenes is also cited as exemplary by Ken Bain in his book, What the Best College Teachers Do, the subject of a pair of earlier posts. You can look at the "Force Concept Inventory" a learning evaluation tool Hestenes developed with his colleague, Ibrahim Halloun, here (pdf).

² Harvard Crimson, June 6, 2007.

³ Boston Globe, April 22, 2007.

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Labels: Classroom training, Evaluation of training, Teaching

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