Michael -
I use both in my economics classes (on why, briefly, in my class of 300
intro students, I'm not sure that they would reliably do the team parts of
TBL). I'm not sure that I do either particularly well; in part, I have to
develop AEs / conceptests and that is a challenge.
At any rate, here's Mazur's latest thinking on PI and teaching:
"Peer Instruction: Engaging Students One-on-One, All at Once"
http://www.compadre.org/per/items/detail.cfm?ID=4990
(this 2007 paper is much more recent than other works)
"Eric Mazur: Memorization or understanding: are we teaching the right thing?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn1DLFnbGOo
(an hour+ lecture he recently gave on teaching)
"From Questions to Concepts: Interactive Teaching in Physics"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg
(a 3 minute sample of what is class looks like)
Both TBL and PI require some sort of student prep before class; he often
uses difficult questions on-line with "Just in Time Teaching" (JiTTs).
Conceptests are often developed by a profession (TBL instructors are
pretty much on their own it seems). A lot of work goes on to develop them;
sometimes they've based on well understood student misconceptions (i.e.
there is a scholarly literature behind them). Also, there is a vastly more
empirical research behind PI and conceptests than TBL has.
Later this month I'll be at Harvard for a teaching conference put on my
Cengage for econ instructors. Mazur will be speaking, which is pretty
unusual. Perhaps they're doing some outreach? That would be great because
as best I know, they're about the only higher ed discipline that can
demonstrate improved student learning by teaching differently. Sure, there
are many papers about how active learning improves outcomes, but as best I
can tell, physicists have done the most work by far and have gone the
furthest in implementing their findings. There is little in other
disciplines to compare to
- Hake's study of 6,000 students taught with different methods
http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf and the
1,300 cites in the scholarly literature it has generated
- "Tutorials in Introductory Physics," Lillian McDermott, which is based
on years of studies of students' misconceptions
- the 50+ physics education research groups listed on http://www.compadre.org/per/
(a great place for further instruction)
- a huge variety of assessments: http://www.ncsu.edu/per/TestInfo.html
- http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/academic/product/0,1144,0321513339,00.html
a textbook based on peer-reviewed research and the input of tens of
thousands of students
Hope that this helps,
Bill
--
Bill Goffe
Department of Economics
SUNY Oswego, 416 Mahar Hall
Oswego, NY 13126
315-312-3444(v), 315-312-5444(f)
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http://cook.rfe.org
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