A single, one slide introduction

• Appropriate for first day

Peer Instruction:Learning Gains in Physics Nearly Double

Crouch, C., Mazur, E. Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results

Traditional Instruction

Peer Instruction

Support from other students

• Appropriate for first day, or after first day of use of PI.

• Clarifies the difference in (possibly less valued) use of “clickers” versus peer instruction (with discussion)

• You may want to use some student support slides n the first day, and sprinkle others at the beginning of lecture as you go along. (say one per week for the first 3-5 weeks).

Clickers vs. Peer Instruction

• Discussion with your peers is KEY!– Testing yourself can help you know if you know it– But LEARNING happens during the discussion!

1) Individual Thinking, Vote2) Group Discussion (with 1-2 other students)3) Group Vote

Pre-Class preparationQuiz/Incentive/Feedback

Class-wide discussion Student-led/Instructor Modeling/Mini-lecture

Students say discussion is helpful…• It really makes you realize exactly what

mistakes you are making and sometimes you don’t feel as bad if you are wrong because you can see that fellow classmates think the same way.

• Discussion is really helpful as sometimes when you get lost in other classes, you are lost for the rest of the lecture. Discussion and clicker questions help make students realize when they are getting confused before it is too late and the discussions with classmates helps get us back on track

*From an upper division computer science course

Students at UCSD LIKE Peer Instruction with clickers!

Lower DivisionNon-MajorsComputing

Upper Division Math-Based Computing

Upper DivisionComputing

Valuable for my learning

91% 80% 79%

Recommend other instructors use

87% 91% 90%

It’s not just YOU!

Clickers allow one to see what other classmates are thinking. As there is often the situation

where everyone has the same question, but are afraid to ask. Once we see that everyone is

thinking the same way, and it is wrong, the fear is removed and people can speak up and learn.

Find out if you are lostBefore it’s too late!

Clickers are nice to have because of the immediacy of the response. Personally when I

submit an assignment or a test, I don't care what I got on it or where I went wrong, and it's difficult to put myself back in the mindset I had when I made the mistake. Clickers let you know

almost immediately whether your line of reasoning is flawed or not.

2-Slide Sequence

• Just the second slide can be used, if you just want to “say” the material from the first slide.

Couldn’t you PLEASE just tell it to me?

I know how to learn from lecture! Can’t you just explain it?

Well, clickers were fun, but the professor made me learn it on my own! It would have been

easier if he’d just lectured!

Learning Requires Your Effort

• I can’t do the learning for you• Higher-level learning = brain development

It’s like muscle development!

Strenuous, repeated effort ->New Muscle Cells

Strenuous, repeated effort ->New Neurons, Links!

Development of new neurons in response to difficult learning taskT. Shors, Sci. Amer. Mar 09