This recent article Dont Lecture Me: Rethinking How College Students Learn about Harvard's professor Eric Mazur talks about the benefits of practicing peer instruction in class, rather than the traditional lecture is just one example.
Some quotes from the article:
Research conducted over the past few decades shows it's impossible for students to take in and process all the information presented during a typical lecture, and yet this is one of the primary ways college students are taught, particularly in introductory courses.
Cognitive scientists determined that people's short-term memory is very limited - it can only process so much at once. A lot of the information presented in a typical lecture comes at students too fast and is quickly forgotten.
So for reasons he can't remember, Mazur told the students to discuss the question with each other. "And something happened in my classroom which I had never seen before," he says. "The entire classroom erupted in chaos. They were dying to explain it to one another and to talk about it." Mazur says after just a few minutes of talking to each other, most of the students seemed to have a much better understanding of the concept he'd been trying to teach.
Watch this space. This is just the beginning.
