My name is Beth Ingram. I'm the Provost
here at North Dakota State University.
Please join me in welcoming professor
Eric Mazur. I never asked myself the
question how am I going to teach? Which
is kind of strange right because when
you do something new in your career that
should be the first question you ask
yourself. The question did not come up in my
mind. It was perfectly clear what I was
going to do. I was going to do to my
students what my teachers had done to me
to lecture this is a picture of me as an
assistant professor teaching at Harvard.
It's a very old picture the picture was
taken BC before computers you see them
I'm using an overhead projector. Now in
my own defense I think we all tend to do
that right we try to project our own
experiences onto the world around us and
I naively thought that I'd learn physics
sitting in a room like this listening to
my professors teach physics and I'm sure
that they too when they started teaching
made that same assumption all the way
back to this guy here who is the German
King giving a guest lecture at the
University of Bologna in 1125. Apart
from the way we dress it's the same. In
fact you know to remind ourselves that
our traditions are you know dating back
all the way to the Middle Ages we still
wear these robes at graduation but other
than that it looks the same. I was asked
to teach physics to pre-medical students
none of my colleagues wanted to teach
the course because pre-medical students
are not very kind to physicists. But
not so for me I you know I got a very
high evaluations 4.5 4.8 on a five-point
scale
and on top of that my students did quite
well on what I consider difficult exams.
So very quickly I started to believe
that I was the world's best physics
teacher. Now that turned out to be
complete illusion nothing could have
been further from the truth but very
pleasant. So it went on quite a while. Now
if you look at education around the
globe that scene that you see on the
screen behind me is repeated all over
the globe right when we see it everywhere. In
fact learning spaces I guess this is
more performing space that a learning space so if I'm sure
that most of the spaces on campus here
are built this way. So I would like to
ask you to describe the process since
you know that seems to be happening in
most education spaces that is
illustrated on the screen behind me.
What is it that is actually happening
there. Projecting. Talking at okay.
Sitting. Listening. Did I hear somebody
say sleeping there? Do I have to remind
you that these are my students? This is
me there on the screen
but you know now that you mentioned
sleeping the French writer Albert Camus
is claimed to have said once, "some people
talk in their sleep, lecturers talk while
other people are sleeping." Now notice
that most of the words that we've heard
I think in fact all of them pertain
either to them or to me. Talking, I'm
talking they're not talking. Listening,
they're listening I'm not listening.
Pontificating, I might be pontificating.
They're certainly not pontificating.
We're both there at the same time. So is
there a way of capturing the process
between them and me? What is it that is
happening? They're telling but that would
be again me, right? Sharing, that's
interesting but sharing I see sharing as
a two-way process. I share something with
you, you share something with me. These
are pretty passive. One-way
knowledge transfer.
I like the transfer, I like the
one-way but I question the knowledge.
Is knowledge something that you can
actually transfer? Think about that.
Is knowledge something that you can transfer
in a room like this? I would argue no
because knowledge is something that
needs to be constructed in the brain of
the learner. But I like the one way and
the transfer. Information, lectures focus
on the transfer of information and you
know what my students had actually rubbed
that in my face very early my teaching
career and instead of paying attention
I've gotten upset.
See I just told you that when I started
teaching I never asked myself "How am I
going to teach?" but there was a question
that did come up in my mind. What was that?
Not how but what? Exactly, so I went to a
colleague who had taught the course
before and I asked him that question he
said "Oh in this course we used we've
used in the past the book by Halliday
and Resnick" those of you who may have
had a physics course a while back may
know that book. It has been a classic for
probably 60 years and I was told, which
surprised me a little bit having been
educated in Europe before I came
over here as a postdoc, that students
would buy the textbook. I mean in Europe,
you know, why would you buy the textbook if the
professor's presenting the content of
the textbook to you. You might as well save
the money. But anyway he told me be sure
that the bookstore has enough copies. So
a month before the course started I went
over to our bookstore the Harvard Coop.
I went to the person responsible for
buying textbooks and I said be sure that
by September 15 you have 150 copies of
Halliday & Resnick in stock. And as I walk
back from Harvard Square to my office
I thought, "wait a minute if the students have
Halliday & Resnick and I have the same
book then what do I do in a classroom?"
Now I started to get nervous you know so
I knocked on my colleagues door before
going to my office and asked him that
question and he said, "Oh Eric, don't worry
there are lots of different physics
textbooks" and he showed me a shelf full
of books that
had collected over the course of his
career. And I started looking and very
quickly I found the perfect book. It was
perfect for two reasons: one it was
different from Halliday & Resnick so at
least I was not just regurgitating the
contents of the book that they'd bought.
But that was not the important reason,
the important reason was the book was
out of print. So for every class I would
prepare lecture notes which I would put
on the overhead projector or put on the
board behind me and because I knew that
my notes were different from the
textbook I thought it would be good for
the students to have a copy of my notes.
Remember this was BC so it's definitely
BI, before the internet, there was no way
of posting them so I had to actually
hand out photocopies. So at the end of
each class as they walked out through
the doors in the back just like here.
They could pick up a copied set of the
lecture notes a photocopied set. Now why
do you think that I hand them out at the
end of class and at the beginning of
class? Otherwise they would not pay
attention or they would not stay but
isn't that already admitting that
there's a problem?
I mean why force the students to get the
information out of my mouth if they
could get it from my lecture note? That
that question never that idea that
thought never crossed my mind but you
know what happened? What happened was
that at the end of that first semester
about half a dozen students wrote on
their end of semester questionnaire in
the comment section, "Professor Mazur is
lecturing straight from his lecture
notes." Hello, I mean what was I supposed
to do develop another set of lecture
notes to lecture from that was different
from lecture notes I handed out to them?
I mean, these ungrateful students. But
you know they had a point. I was
lecturing from my lecture notes and if
they would have looked at that textbook
they would have seen that the book wasn't that different
from the lecture notes. Now this scene
here behind me is repeated all over the
world. I'm sure that if we were to stop
this talk right now and together walk
around campus and pop in a few
classrooms you might see a room that's
very similar. So that begs the following
question "Is education just the transfer
of information?" I mean it's not a crazy
question, right, because that's what I
would say probably around the world
99.9% of instructors do. If you believe
that education is just the transfer of
information press 1. If you think
information is more than just the
transfer of information press 2. Okay so
let's see where we stand in on this
issue. I don't know what C is. Well,
ignore that one but we have an
overwhelming majority that says "No
education is more than just a
transfer of information". What 7% so a dozen or so
of you said yes. I have a warning for you.
If you're a teacher and you clicked one
you're in trouble. You're about to lose
your job because let's face it. Let's
imagine for a moment that education were
just a transfer of information. I know
most of us don't agree with that but
let's just imagine for a moment.
Education is just a transfer information
If that were the case, what would be the
logical thing to do? Put it online
exactly. In fact it's already happening. What
would we lose if we took all of our
courses and all of our classes and put
them record them in different languages
and put them online?
Of course we'd lose our jobs but but but,
in addition, to our jobs what is it
that we would lose? Interaction, did I hear that?
Interaction but how much interaction is
there really? See, I'm trying to interact
with you here it's not easy it's not
easy because the space is simply not
conducive to to interacting. You came in
here thinking I'm going to sit down and
listen to Erik Mazur present and that
puts you in the same passive mode you
would be in a movie theater or in a
concert or anywhere else. You know I make
a habit of observing of observing
colleagues on campus teach different
classes and when it's a lecture class it's
always the same scene you see. We have some
pretty good lecturers on campus you know,
engaging, speaking style, dynamic, and they
talk and then after 10 or so minutes
they stop. And they say "does anybody
have a question?" The students look down.
They don't want to make eye contact and
if the instructor waits long enough it's
always the same person in the front row who asks questions. Most people do not want to
interact. So I would say we may lose a
little bit of interaction but precious
little because most students do not
interact. I think actually if we were to
put all of our courses online we'd
actually gain something. Because see one
of the problem with a lecture is that
there is very little opportunity to
think. All right let's say that we not
not talking about education. I wasn't talking education
but I was talking about
physics and I say something that
confuses you. "Hmm I've got to think
about this." Your mind starts wandering
and as it starts wandering you're no
longer listening. Right, you either listen
or you engage cognitively in a
meaningful way with the material and you
think. Have you ever had in one of your
classes a student raise his or her hand
and say "Professor, could you please be
quiet for five minutes I need to think."
It's never happened in my courses and
I'd be surprised at if it happened in
yours but you have to admit if you
actually want to think that's what you
should do. Now online you could do that.
Right, you could hit the pause button and
think "hmm, I've got to think about
this." Not that it happens but you could.
Right, so my point here is this, if
education is just the transfer of
information we're doomed. We're doomed.
Because there are better ways of
transferring information than orally in
a lecture. Luckily, I think most of us
agree that there's more to education than
just a transfer information so we won't
lose our jobs. So now let me talk about,
let me turn to the 93% of you said no.
What more than just the transfer of
information is education? Social
engagement. Motivation, I would argue I
could get motivated from an online
lecture. I've seen some TED talks that
are extremely engaging and motivating. So
that could still happen. Yeah, critical
thinking and debating. Reciprocity, we're
learning when we're teaching. Very good.
Personal connection, although again I
would argue you can to some degree do
that online I've seen again some TED
talks that are extremely personal and
personally connecting. I'm thinking of
this one woman who got a stroke and
described sort of the whole experience
of a stroke well it's riveting and and
and and connecting. The lecture can get
feedback from the from the audience
and gauge what's going on. Combining. God I got you
fired up now. Combining ideas to
create new knowledge. Two more. Social
interactions. Synthesizing knowledge so I
think that last point is good point to
pause for a moment because that's more
or less where I wanted to go. You see
it's not enough for the learner to open
his or her skull get the information in
and close the skull and then hope to
hang on to the information long enough
to be able to regurgitate on the exam. As
a learner you have to
do something with that information you
have to extract from that information
the knowledge, the mental models if you
want, that permits you to apply whatever
knowledge is embedded in that information
in a new context.
Now, I've often asked myself where did
that happen for me? Ask yourself that
question too, where did it happen for you?
Where did the things click or stick?
Where did you have the aha moment? "Ohhh, I get it. Now
I get it."
Did that happen while you were sitting
in a room like this listening to your
professors? I see quite a few people
shake their heads no. No, it probably happen
outside of the classroom not in the
classroom. But that was a crucial part of
us becoming content experts and you know
we were dedicated to doing that otherwise
we would never become professors
most of our students however taking,
especially in large introductory classes,
are not taking the course because they
want to become an expert in that field
because somebody told them to go and
take that course. Anyway it took a long
time to find out that it was a complete
illusion that I wasn't the world's best
physics teacher that was probably one of
the worst. I read about a test that
tests students conceptual understanding of
force using just words and the author of
the test claimed that it didn't make
much difference whether you tested the
students at the beginning of the
semester or at the end of the semester they
would do equally poorly you know most of
my students at Harvard have taken AP
course and gotten five. So I barely
even talked about force in my course. I
sort of assumed they already knew about
it and I learned it in high school. So I read
that and I thought "no way not my students".
See after all this author had been at Arizona
State University and it mostly tested
students in the Southwest you know
California, Arizona so I thought maybe there's
some kind of a disease that's raging in
the southwest. Up, up in the Northeast
at Harvard its definitely going to be
better but one thing I've learned is you
know you don't just make statements you
show things. So I thought I am going to
show that in
my class students ace this test. It's
too late to do a pre test at the
beginning of the semester. We're about
two weeks before the exam and but I
thought I have to show it. So I
gave this test to my students it took no
more than two minutes for my life to
change forever because they'd just started
or one student sort of slowly raised her
hand and I walked up to her and she
looked at me and she said "Professor Mazur,
how am I supposed to answer these
questions? According to what you taught
us or according to the way I usually
think about these things?" I had no idea
how to answer that question and by the
time the test had been completed it was
clear that I had a major a problem.
Students had no clue what the concept of
force was. So, you know, I started to think
about education in a different way it's
it's not just about the transfer of information.
The transfer of information is a necessary first step
but not sufficient. The learner has to
have an opportunity to assimilate or
(inaudible) would have probably called it
accommodate the information. In the
traditional approach to teaching we put
all of the emphasis in class on that
first step and then we let the students
take the responsibility for that second
part. If you ask yourself, "which of those
two steps listed on the screen is the
easy one and which is the hard one?" I'd
be surprised, I'm not going to do it
because I'm going to run out of time but,
if we were voting on it I think we'd all
agree it's a second one the hard one. So it's
kind of ironic that we put all of the
emphasis on the easy part
and then leave the hard part to the
students on their own we should really
focus on the hard part. So that's when I
came up in 1990 with the idea of you
know flipping that around and giving the
students the responsibility for the
transfer of information so that in class I could
essentially focus on the assimilation of
the information.
Right now I want to pose the question, if
you've been able to
successfully give students the
responsibility for the information
transfer, then what do you do in the
class? Well the answer to that question
is nothing new. Teach by questioning
instead of telling. Who's the first one
to actually have said that? Socrates
2,000 years ago and here we're in the
21st century and still most classes
especially in STEM fields, I think you
know humanities are probably doing
better, are still mostly taught by
telling rather than questioning. Now, it's
not that I was sitting there thinking at
home, "Socrates teach by questioning." No it
was sort of a serendipitous discovery.
You see, after giving that test to my
students, not only was I shocked they
were equally worried. Right, there was two
weeks before the final exam they
couldn't understand why they'd done so
poorly and they were worried. So they
asked me for a special session to go
through every single question on that
test. So I booked a room like this at
that point I 250 students in my class
and I, I went through every single
question. I remember coming to a
question which in my mind was completely
trivial. So I turned my back to them I
sketched a few things on the board and I
turned around and I said I gave them the
answer. I could see from their faces that
they were completely confused so I said,
"is there a question?" They were so
confused they could not even articulate
a question. So I thought boy this is serious you
know maybe I should you know bring in
additional aspects. So I erased the
board, I started all over.
In the next eight minutes I gave the
most brilliant explanation you could
possibly imagine, okay the whole board
was covered at the end with equations
and drawings. I'd worked out every
little detail in the most exquisite
detail. Of course I'd done this all with my
back to them and I turned around,
triumphantly,
only to see that they looked even more
confused. And they could still not
articulate a question that I understood.
You know how it is, right? When you're a
beginning learner, it's sometimes harder
hard to pinpoint what your difficulty is
and as the expert you don't connect to
to that to that to that difficulty. So I
didn't know what to do. I knew however
that half of them had given the right
answer on the test. So in a moment of
despair I said to them why don't you
just discuss it with each other.
And something happened I've never seen
in my classroom. Complete utter chaos.
They forgot about me, I could have walked
out they would not have noticed it. But
what was even more surprising, in just two
minutes they figured it out. I was really
stunned by that I thought how can it be
I the expert try unsuccessfully for ten
minutes in two different ways to explain
it and they just figure it out. But
imagine you have two students sitting
next to each other John and Mary. Mary
gets it and has the right answer she
understands it. John does not and gets the
wrong answer.
On average Mary will be more likely to
convince John than the other way around.
Simply the force of logic but this is
the crucial point, that's not the
important point. The important point is this,
Mary is more likely to convince John
then professor Mazur in front of the
class. Why? Because she has only recently
learned. She still knows what the
difficulties are that a beginning
learner has. Whereas professor
Mazur learned it such a long time ago -
in his mind it's so clear that he can't
even understand why somebody doesn't
understand it. It's what my colleague,
Steven Pinker, calls the curse of
knowledge. We developed these blind spots.
We forget and in fact you know remember
when you were a student often you
wouldn't even bother asking your
professor because question would go
straight over your head.
You'd ask a friend first, "hey, do you
understand what was going on there?"
because you'd know you'd get a an
explanation at the right level. So when I
saw that I thought "god that's what I
got to do in my classroom." So, I step into
the classroom, I talk a few minutes not
half an hour like I do now and I pose a
question. And then after I pose the
question I give students time to think,
it's quiet. In fact, I tell my students
you're not allowed to talk to anyone.
It's as quiet as during an exam. "If you
talk to your neighbor I'm gonna I ask you to
stand up and tell the whole room what
you just told your neighbor." Then I
polled them initially, you have a clicker
so you may think the technology is
important but it's not important, it's the
pedagogy that matters, initially I just
had them and in my talk this morning we
did that and in the physics department.
Just let them put their hand on the chest
with you know 1 2 3 4 5 fingers or you
can use flashcards. The clicker is just
sort of icing on the cake if you want. So
I polled them and I try to design the
questions so that between 30 and 70
percent have the right answer. If less
than 30 percent have the right or
desired answer they're simply not enough
students to convince others. If it's more
than 70 they're going to very quickly
run out of things to say and they're
going to be off task. They're going to
start you know pull out their cell
phones and check their email or do
something else but if it's between 30
and 70 there's likely to be a very
lively discussion and many aha moments
during that discussion. I tell my
students also, holds for you in the back
too, in a minute when we try it out if I
see you sit alone not talk to somebody I
will come and talk to you. And the first
few lectures I make a habit of quickly
running through that and they very quickly
reseat themselves and talk to their to
other students. I poll them again and
again if it's between 30 and 70 the
first poll it's not unusual to go to, you
know, much larger percentages after. Then
explain either by asking students to
explain it or by providing my
explanation. And then the cycle
essentially repeats until class time is
up and the learning, the "aha" moments
take place there, you actually see
students go "ohhh".
I don't know if I have a little video up here.
It's okay so you can sort of hear the
audio there so I read the question with
them. They and then they think about it.
I let them think for between a minute
and two minutes and it's quiet then. I
see on my screen how they vote I do not
share that with them. See the aha moment
there. That's one of the most exciting
things when you see this aha moment. This
light go on in the eyes of your students.
And that's not unusual I do show them
that second distribution to close the
loop. So what's going on one, it's active
not passive it is impossible to sleep
through my lectures because every few
minutes your neighbor will start talking
to you. Secondly, now it's a two-way flow
of information. It's not only information
going from to them, there's information
coming back from them to me. Thirdly, it's
continuous feedback on the learning
without any threat or there is not any
high stakes. I don't give points for
participation. I don't give points for
getting it right. It just has to be
completely intrinsically motivated. So, if
as a student, you're still answering
A after the discussion and you see that
90 some percent of your class is B.
It's a little warning, right? "Oh I gotta look at
this most of my class got it right. I
don't. So it's a way of continuously
assessing your own knowledge in a non
high-stakes way. And lastly it
personalizes the instruction. Student A
can help student B students C can help
student D even though B and D
have two very different problems, right.
So it's in a sense it crowd sources and
personalizes the instruction. So anyway,
so thermal expansion deals with the fact
that hard solids like wood or concrete
or steel expand when they get hotter and
they shrink again when they get cold.
It's very important technology. Just to give
you one example if you've ever heard a
train go by at low speed or been in a
train.
You have trains not very far from here. You may
have heard this clickety clack sound of
the wheels as it goes from one section
of the rail
to the other. It's because they put the
section and the sections leaving a
little gap, tiny gap between the rail so
that if the weather gets hotter and the
rail expands there's space for that
expansion to happen. If you don't do that
bad things happen as you can see from
this railroad in India that was put, you
know, back to back. When you build large
steel beam buildings you need to take
that into account. Next time that you
park your car at a concrete parking
structure,
after you park your car look down and
you'll see that every ten yards or so
there's a rubber strip. When they put
down these concrete slabs they leave a
little gap between the concrete slabs
which they fill with rubber so that when
it gets hotter the concrete expands the
rubber compresses. It's not a hard solid
a soft solid so it can take that into
account. If you think, "well that's all you
know maybe interesting for engineers it
doesn't concern me."
Well, next time you go to your dentist it
does concern you. Because if the dentist
finds a cavity then she or he will need
to fill that cavity. And if you were to
just use some kind of a metal let's say
to fill that cavity then you'd have a
serious problem the next time you drink
a cup of hot tea or hot coffee. Because
the metal would expand and metals tend
to expand more than other materials such
as the material that your tooth is made
from and ouch,
you know, crack there goes the tooth. It's
in two parts all of a sudden, so the
dentist actually has to use a mixture of
materials called amalgam, which expands
and contracts the same way that your
tooth expands. Now the reason that solids
expand is that they're made from atoms.
I'm showing nine of them here and in a
solid atoms hold each other in place if
they don't move relative to each other
and when it gets hotter the atoms get
further away from each other.
Cold and hot that's all there is to it. That's all
you need to know to answer the question
I'm going to ask you. Now you may wonder
why is it that atoms get further away
from each other. I'm not going to ask you
about it but but just to satisfy your
curiosity the reason is that atoms do
not sit still.
They vibrate back and forth like this
and the amplitude of that vibration is
related to what we call temperature. So
this is these are cold atoms and these
are hot atoms. Cold atoms.
Hot atoms. So if you were an atom. You
wouldn't just sit like that you'd
actually be shaking back and forth and
as it gets hotter you shake back and
forth over a bigger amplitude and you
need more space. You can't get crammed
together as much because you just push
the people around you away and they in
turn push the people around them away.
And it's not just those nine it's all
of them. So cold and hot, questions anyone?
Thank you for reaffirming that I'm a
brilliant lecturer. This is really wonderful.
Although, I think I heard a question there
but you know I'm not going to simply ask
you to regurgitate that same information. I'm going to
see if you can take this picture of
atoms getting further away from each
other all of them and apply that to a
different context. Remember I'm going to
ask you the question, by then it's too
late to ask me questions okay, and you're
not allowed to talk to your neighbor. If
you talk to your neighbor I'm going to
ask you to stand up and tell the
whole room, out of fairness, what you just
told your neighbor. Then we're going to
vote and I'm not going to show you the
distribution. I'm going to ask you to
find after that a neighbor who has a
different answer. So if you turn to your
right and that person has the same answer
you say, "thank you very much" and turn to
the person on your left. If that person
also has the same answer you turn to
the person behind you or in front of you
if everybody around you has the same
answer do not assume you're all correct.
Get up walk around find somebody with a
different answer. Instructions clear? Good.
Okay, so here's the question.
Consider a rectangular metal plate with
a circular hole in it. Now imagine that
we uniformly heat this plate.
What happens to the diameter of the hole
as the metal expands? Does it increase,
does it stay the same, or does it
decrease so so if you don't know for
sure
choose whichever you think is closest to
what might be the truth. Okay, good,
so now find the neighbor with a different
answer and then try to convince that
neighbor that you're right and he or she is
wrong. Go ahead if you. Now look at that
you all got fired up. I'm not here to talk
about thermal expansion. I'm here to
talk about pedagogy.
The answer to this question doesn't even
matter. If you look at small children in
a sense we all born scientists, right.
Three, four, five, six year-olds they keep
asking their parents their teachers why
why why why. We're wired to wanting
to understand the world around us. Whether
you become a social scientist or an
economist or or or a painter or whatever
we were all born scientists. And it's
kind of a shame that education, and
that's true everywhere not here but all
over the U.S. all over the world really,
does a really good job turning this
innate curiosity, that
we're born with, off.
The good news is I've just shown you how
easy it is to turn it back on. Right
because imagine I had given the same
little lecture that I gave you a moment
ago but instead of asking you the
question I would have said "let's now
apply this to rectangular metal plates
with circular holes in it", if we take one
of these plate and put it in the oven
the plate will expand and the diameter
of the hole will... I'm going to keep you in
suspense a little longer... you know, you would have
been sleeping through it. I mean, what is
more boring than metal plates with circle
holes in it? Isn't it amazing,
right? I trust me, if you can do
this with metal plates with circular
holes in it you can do it with anything.
You can do it with absolutely anything.
Now you know I want to keep you in
suspense a bit longer. Let's sort of
analyze the psychology of this. I asked
you a question
and then you thought about the question
and then you had to make a commitment.
Right, I told you to make a commitment. We
could have done this hands on the
chest would have been exactly the same
or by clicking. And then after that I
asked you to externalize your answer, not
to me, which would have been intimidating
but to a neighbor. And something
interesting happened we could see it with
you continuing to talk and gesticulating.
All of you moved away from
the answer to the reasoning. All of you
were sitting there like this trying to
you know talk about not the answer but
how you get to the answer. This
approach in a sense brings the thinking,
I think it was you mentioning critical
thinking, back in the classroom. But most
importantly you got emotionally invested
in the learning process because if I
were to tell you now, "Bye gotta go. Got a plane
to catch",
you'd come running after me asking
"what's the answer to that question?"
Now, before I can give you the answer you
have to vote again.
So please indicate what you now believe
to be the right answer. You know I
thought I gave a pretty darn clear
lecture here and so did you.
Only a quarter of you got the right answer
the first time around and unfortunately
the method doesn't work that well
because as I said you need at least
about thirty percent correct. So in a
sense you've made a very important point.
Because in a sense
you have been telling me, by the way you
voted, "Eric you're lecturing sucks" which
is actually precisely the point I wanted
to make. It seemed clear but in reality
you haven't even begun to learn. The right
answer is number one!
So let's see here. Wow
look at that, look at that. Let's compare
it to the previous, so you started about
a quarter correct and it went up and all
the other choices went down. So even
though only a quarter of you got the
right answer the first time, notice that
it moved in the right direction. And
right now at 40 percent it's almost the
dominant answer now. I don't want you to
lie in bed tonight at 2:00 a.m.
wide awake. So let me take a minute of my
precious time to explain this this
question.
Imagine you have a jar of marmalade in
the refrigerator. It's one of these ball
jars. Right, glass jar, metal lid, the medal lid
is a ring and a plate. You take it out
you can't open it what do you do? You run
the metal lid under hot water. The ring
expands and the hole gets larger. You say
"yeah, but you didn't ask about the ring
you asked about a plate", ok ok. Could I have
a piece of paper? Can I borrow your pad
for just a second the whole pad. Just give me the whole pad.
Imagine we have a plate, sorry, thank
you, imagine we have a plate no hole in
it. Can you imagine that? We take a marker
we draw a circle, so now we have a plate
with a circle. We put this plate with a
circle in the oven. Thank you.
We turn the temperature up. The plate
expands what happens to the diameter of
the circle? Yeah everything gets bigger
so the circle gets bigger too. You say
"that's unfair there's no hole". If there was a
hole then the others would expand into the
hole. I'll show you what's wrong with
that. Let's imagine that we go outside
and we form a big circle each holding
hands. So now I hold your hand and so one
big circle. Each of us is an atom, one of
these dots there, at the edge of the hole.
Can you imagine that? So there we are
holding hands and now we are at the same
time step in towards the center of the
hole. What just happened to the distance
between us? It got smaller, it can't get
smaller because we're shaking more we
need more space. Well, the only way to
make more space is to remove a few of us.
But atoms in a solid don't disappear
like that or to make the hole larger.
Okay, back to peer instruction. The first
time I did it I doubled the learning
gains. I doubled it. Not 10% 20, 100% and
in subsequent years by asking better
questions I tripled the learning gains. I mean it was
huge okay. And you know studies have
shown that in other fields from from
computer science to the humanities
similar types of gains and the study
occurring now shows better retention. Which
makes sense right, because once you've
had this "aha" moment it sticks. We've
eliminated this, right. And the question
is really how do we effectively transfer
the information outside of the classroom?
My first impulse when I started doing
this was, "lets have the students just watch a
recorded video". I've recorded my lectures,
why have those lectures again? Let just
have them, there's not that much
interaction anyway. Why not have them
watch the recorded lectures? But you see
there a problem with video and the
problem is that the transfer pace is set
by the video in the same way that the
transfer pace is set by the lecturer. I
already said are very few students or no
students who will just shut you up
during lecture because they need to
think. Now with video you could pause it.
However if you look at EDX data or
pre-lecture data and so on you find that
the students do the opposite. They put
the playback speed at 1.5 my daughter
told me she goes to 2.0.
Amazing, how do you get through it as
quickly as you can?
Giving you even less of an opportunity
to think and process. And there's plenty
of studies that have shown that you know
when you put people in front of a TV
they're passive. They turn into, the brain
turns into a meditative state. Why would
you be more actively engaged when you're
watching a lecturer lecture than when
you watch something on TV? Also this
again from the EDX data you find that
the students maybe watch the whole video
for the first class in the semester but
as time goes on they very quickly
discover that the way they're held
accountable is by answering a few
multiple choice questions. And they can often
simply answer the multiple-choice
question by multiple tries or by fishing
for the answer or Googling it or
whatever. So towards the end of this
method they don't even watch the video
anymore. They go straight to the multiple
choice question and answer that. But,
and perhaps most importantly it's an
isolated individual experience. You the
student and the video. Whereas learning
deep down is a social experience. So I
think if we have students watch video
and all that we're really doing is
moving this out of the classroom. Which
you know is not the most important. So then
I thought let's have them read books
because books have an advantage right?
Now you the reader are in control if you
read something that makes you think, you
stop reading because you can't think
and read. Well, you might read a few more
sentences but then you realize that you're
reading without thinking about what
you're reading. You're thinking about something
else and you go back. You are in control
of the transfer pace. Also there's lots
of studies showing that the brain is
much more actively engaged during
reading than during listening and
watching. So those are two big advantages
of reading over watching or listening.
However, we still have a problem because
we don't have any real accountability.
How do I know my students are reading if
I tell them read chapter 22? And secondly,
it's still an individual isolated
experience. What we really want is this,
we want every student prepared for every
class. And I don't know about you but
ideally we want that without extra
effort because we're already quite busy. This
solution suddenly hit me four years ago.
It was really like, "duh why did I think
about this earlier?" I put all of my
effort in making the classroom a more
social experience like you've just seen.
The key was to make the out of class
component also a social experience. So this
platform, which is free, Perusall at Perusall.com,
is essentially a social learning
platform that is interactive. Students
log in through their preferred social network
or through the LMS or they can make an
account. All these possibilities are ok.
And once you're logged in it actually
looks a little bit like an e-reader but
it's not an e-reader it's much more than
that. The first thing that you'll notice
is you can see who else is online
reading that text. But more importantly
as you're reading if there's something
that, you know, interests you or causes you
to wonder or ask a question, you can
highlight the text which opens up a chat
window and then you can type something
in the chat window. And as you hit the
return the the highlight sticks. So after
a while the page will be marked up, you know,
with highlights and you can click on
any of these highlights and it opens the
transcript of the chat attached to that
particular passage in the text. So here
for example, I don't understand how this
combination of factors tells you
anything about blah blah blah, October 20th,
midnight. Half an hour later, I
think you may be able to think about the
direction separately so blah blah.
Two days later third student, different
from the first two, says "this is a great
question to further elaborate on this we
can think of this in terms of" blah blah.
So what do you see here? You sort of see
in an asynchronous peer instruction
students helping each other parse the
text and understand by sharing. Which
we've heard mentioned
already by a number of people so in
Facebook you have a "like" button we don't
have like buttons we have question flags.
So if you read a question and you have
that same question you can click this
button which increments the count. And we
have another button which is the "this
helps me" flag. So in other words if you
see an explanation that it's helpful you
can click it which then turns that green
and as more and more students puts it there's a
counter in front of it gets incremented and
students attention, attention gets drawn
to important questions that have been
unanswered and explanations that are
helpful. So what if you know you have put
a question and you're no longer online
you're you know at the dining hall or
whatever. Well, you'll get an email and
the email first of all reminds you of the
question that you asked, twenty-one
minutes ago you ask this question and
then it says "Ryan just responded to this
question by saying, blah blah, if this
helps your understanding click the
button below." So there are three things
you can do, well, four you can ignore it, but
you can reply to the email without going
back to the platform and then whatever
you type into the email gets inserted in
the chat as if you had magically been
online. Or you if you don't remember
where you asked the question you can click
on that which puts you back into the
system at the right place or you can
click this button this "comment helps my
understanding" which is same thing as
clicking that little check button. Here's
the big question, how do we get students
to participate? And we essentially use a
combination of intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation drives. I would love to have
it purely intrinsically motivated but as
you and I know especially in large
courses, you know, students are not
necessarily intrinsically motivated. So
we tell the students that the body of
their message has to demonstrate
thoughtful reading and interpretation of
the text. Which means that if you all you
do is highlight something and write I
don't understand this you get no credit
whatsoever because you can do that
without reading. If you highlight something
and you said I don't understand this because
on page 256 it says blah blah blah you
get partial credit. If you highlight
sayings and you say I don't understand
this because on page 256 this is blah, blah,
blah and you reveal your
thinking now you start to get real credit. We
want students to have a certain minimum
of that and of course you want it to be
before the class starts and we want them
to be distributed not clustered. So if
it's a twenty page reading assignment
you don't want only annotations on the
first page and you know.
So with that rubric which is on the
Perusall. You can download and give it to
your students we get twenty thousand, in
a class of sixty like I teach twenty
thousand annotations. The students write
more in one semester than the author of
the textbook. So I can already hear you
think you know how do you process all of
that? Well, this is the exciting part, it's
fully automated. I got together with a
quantitative social scientist on campus
who does machine learning analysis of
social media because I realized that if
you look at you know Twitter and Facebook
page and you can do machine learning analysis
of that, you could certainly do the same
approach to look at annotations in
different text books. So we use a
specialized machine learning algorithm
and it actually assesses intellectual
content and we've demonstrated, I put
one of my students, I give this as a
educational research project to one of
my graduate students. And in her thesis
we demonstrated that the machine tracks
the person who has trained the machine better
than another human being. So in other
words the agreement between trainer and
machine is about 80%. If you take two
individuals the best they can after even
talking to each other is agree on 75%
because you know its not completely
objective of course. So immediately after
an assignment you have a grade book
showing, you know, the names of your
students and what they have for the
different assignments. You can click on a
on a grade and see you know how many
annotations which one were submitted
before the deadline and the students get
the same feedback. But it gets much
better than this because that is just
the stick in a sense let me tell you about
the carrot. When I started doing this I
realized that those annotations were
like a window into the brains of my
students. My fingers were itching to
click on them and see what are they
thinking. I was particular interested
because the book we were
using was my book but also if I knew
what the students were had questions
about I could design a better class.
Right, because then in class rather than asking
the questions that come up in my mind. I
can ask the questions that come up in
their mind. So in the beginning I was
just clicking a thousand times before
class to come up with some good
questions but then I realized, you know,
we should really automate this. So
there's a button in Perusall called the
confusion report. Which essentially gives
you for whatever the assignment is, this
was chapter 24. This was actually from a
class at University of Central Florida.
You know it tells you the three or four
topics that lead to the most confusion.
So I can walk into class and say, "thank
you for your thoughtful annotations." It
looks as if you are mostly confused
about these topics. I don't show the
confusion report, I just makes slide
that has those terms. Topic one, topic two,
topic three. One of you asked this great
question.
I just take their questions and they'll
go, "wow he actually reads our annotations." The nine
of them but they don't need to know that. So
now all of a sudden what do we have? We
have a combination of intrinsic
motivation. One is the social interaction.
I'll show you it's fun to be online
because you know you can talk you can
chat with each other you can interact
synchronously or asynchronously. And
there's also tie in to the in-class
activity. If you take the trouble of
reading there's a good chance that either a
student will help you or it will be
addressed the next week and next day
in class. And then of course there's the
extrinsic motivation, which is fully
automated. Here's what one student wrote in
a survey that we do, "I think the Perusall
app in my class, Perusall app
annotation way better than just reading
a textbook normally. I've been reading
for almost four hours now and haven't
gotten bored."
Okay in all fairness, I have to tell you he
was reading my textbooks.
Here's Ohio State where they're using it in
a lot of large classes. This is from a
600 student introductory chemistry class.
"It makes the book fun to read. All the
other students on my floor are
disappointed their professor isn't using
Perusall because they don't read the book."
Let me show you some amazing data. Ok?
These are three semesters, three
semesters ago, two semester ago, one semester. We were
fiddling with the algorithm. This
shows the percentage of students versus
the number of chapters missed before
class. They had to read over the entire
semester, 17 chapters distributed over the
course. So this goes on and on
and on and on to the door there on the
far right. But all the data are zeros,
so I'm just omitting it. Look at the
first bid nearly 70% of the students
misses 0 chapter. Every single chapter is
read and annotated. I don't know about
you but I certainly sometimes miss
deadlines. I have other things that take my
time and you know student's might get sick.
Or they might have an exam another class, so
if we add the ones who missed one
chapter and two chapters together with
those that miss zero we get close to 95
percent. I think that's as close as we'll
ever come to having every student
prepared for every class. There at Ohio
State they did it really good because
there's so many students, right?
They found that the students using who were using Perusall
score significantly higher on exams than
those who don't. Which maybe it's not
that surprising but it's good to
actually see that in in data. So what are
the benefits?
Virtually hundred percent completion of
pre class assignments much better than I
ever had with any other technique. It
also means improved use of class time
because now rather than repeating what's
in the book, you know which parts may
need highlighting and already the
students have suggested questions that
you can use in class. They help you
prepare, you only need to read that
confusion report. It's free to use. If you
use your own text you can just upload it
and done if you use a commercial
textbook then what you do is you tell us
which book it is and the students get
eBook access. Which typically depending
on whether they want temporary
access or permanent access, you know, it's as
low as 30% of the cost of a textbook.
So it's a win-win-win. It's a win for
your students and it's a win for you. And
again if you want to go there
Perusall.com.
So, I hope that I've convinced you that
education is not just about transferring
information because we have good ways of
doing that now. It's also not about
getting students to do what we do. I want
my students to stand on my shoulders. I
want my students to be able to solve the
problems that I cannot solve. We want the
next generation to solve the problems that
this generation can't. We have plenty of
problems, you know, from from political
problems to you know health, environment,
privacy, you name it, lots of problems. We
don't know how to solve them. The next
generation better figure it out and that
means we must prepare our students not
just to solve the problems that we have
solved but the problems that have not yet
been solved. And I think the only way to
do that is to essentially engage the
students actively and socially with each
other both in the classroom and outside
of the classroom. Thank you very much.
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