Lectures and Learning: Pedagogies, Technologies, and Peer Learning for the 21st Century

Discussions of teaching and learning and even some publications abound with anecdotal evidence concerning our profession. And our intuition often supplants a systematic, scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn't work in the classroom. Yet, research is increasingly demonstrating that our gut feelings about teaching and learning are often wrong. It has also been suggested that the lack of interaction in large lecture courses is to blame for the many problems facing these courses: declining enrollments, low attendance, poor evaluations, and disappointing retention. This presentation offers a way of redesigning the classroom so interaction and student engagement is introduced in many aspects of the course. Then Professor Mazur shares research conducted by the Mazur Group concerning large science courses, and the effectiveness of classroom demonstrations.