Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning

In this interview, Eric Mazur, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University, explains how peer instruction works, the value of “just in time” teaching, and why assessment has become the silent killer of learning.

Transcript

THE BIRTH OF PEER INSTRUCTION

Eric Mazur: So, I booked a classroom at night, from 7 pm to 10 pm. I went through every single question, and I remember coming to a question which in my mind was totally obvious. In fact, as I was thinking “how am I going to explain to my students the answer?”, I thought, “that’s just the way it is, there’s nothing to explain about it,” that’s how clear it was in my mind. I remember making a drawing on the board and then saying, you know, this was comparing two forces in the direction pair, I remember turning around and saying “by Newton’s third law, these two forces are equal. To me, there was nothing else to explain about it, and I had about a hundred. No, I had about 250 students in my class that year.

I remember turning around, with the drawing behind me, looking at the students, and seeing from their faces that they were confused. So, I could not imagine what was confusing about it, so I said “is there a question?”, they were so confused they could not articulate a question, they didn’t, couldn’t bring up words, you know, when you’re really confused about something, it’s hard to articulate that confusion, so, you know, I thought “well, maybe they’re confused that the forces are the same, but the effect is different.” So, anyway, I erased the board and started over and, in the next 8 or so minutes, I gave what I thought was the most brilliant explanation possible, so the whole board was covered in drawings, equations and it was all there, you know, the forces could be the same, but the effects would be different, and I turned around thinking “this is just great!”, you know, they looked even more confused. And I had no idea what to do.

I was standing there, thinking, you know, “how can this be?” They were asking questions, but I didn’t even understand what they were asking me, right? Because their vocabulary was different from mine. So anyway, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew one thing: I knew that half the students had given the right answer on the test. So, in a moment of despair, I said to them, “What if you just discuss it with each other?” and what happened was amazing: complete, utter chaos. Ok, I mean, everybody started talking, they forgot about me in front of the classroom, and what was even more surprising was that in two minutes they figured it out, you could see the students go, talk and then go… and for a moment, it surprised me, I thought, “how can that be? I, the expert, have tried it in two different ways for about 10 minutes, unsuccessfully explain to them, and they just talked for two minutes, and they get it?”

Let’s imagine that you and I are sitting next to each other, we’re students. You have the right answer because you understand it, and I have the wrong answer because I do not understand it. We talk to each other. On average, you are more likely to convince me than the other way around, simply because you have the right way of thinking. But that’s not the important thing, the important thing is this: you, as a student, are more likely to convince me, as a student, because professor Mazur in front of the class has learned it such a long time ago, to him it’s so incredibly clear that he doesn’t (off: doesn’t remember how it is to be confused), exactly! Right? Something my colleague Steven Pinker calls “the curse of knowledge.” You tend to think that the more of an expert you are, the better positioned you are to teach it, false, the better you know it, the more likely it is that you’ve forgotten what the struggles are of a beginner learner, even if you had those struggles yourself way back when, and, you know, to some degree we know that, right?

We know that when we go to a colloquial, to a seminar on our own discipline and we listen, yes, we can get excited, but then if we’re asked to reproduce whatever was said, we can’t. We also know that often people who are in age-close to the people that are being taught are more effective at teaching than the older professor, graduate students who teach the discussion session are often closer to the students and are therefore better at explaining it. So, why not tap the students themselves? So that’s, that’s how the idea of peer instruction was born, right? So, when I saw that interaction, I saw it, wow, that’s what I should do.

HOW DOES PEER INSTRUCTION WORK

Eric Mazur: The cycle, let me describe it: so I come into class, I talk maybe a few minutes, I ask a question, I give them one minute to think about that, I have them vote, first we simply used hands on the chest, with fingers indicating the choice, after that came the clicker, which was developed in part in my classroom, and then people adopted the clicker, it was outthinking about the pedagogy. But, forget about it, about the technology; students have to commit to an answer, they could do it on paper, and after they’ve committed they have to find a neighbor for a different answer, so I turn to you, ask you “what answer did you have? Oh, I had the same answer, so, thank you,” and I turn to the other neighbor, I try to find a person around me with a different answer. We start to argue, and chances are that one of us will go “oh, yes, you’re right” and change our mark.

Typically, if initially, between 30 and 70% have a desire to answer, then, after a few minutes of discussion, that 30 to 70% can increase to close to a 100%, and there are many students who would have gone “oh, yes”, and then, you know, I wrap up, with a quiz of discussion, and I start the next cycle, and then the next cycle, and so on until class time is up.

JUST IN TIME TEACHING 

Eric Mazur: So, I came across a technique called “Just in time teaching,” which I used for many years, it is essentially to offer the students a carrot and a stick. It’s only really in the last 5 years that I’ve been able to nail this problem, and the way I nailed it is actually so obvious in retrospect, you see: I worked hard in making the classroom a social interaction, with students talking to each other, helping each other. I never thought about making the out-of-class component of social interaction, I mean, again, if you have a student reading a book, it’s an isolated, lonely experience, right? You’re reading the book alone. What if we could, somehow, use technology to bring students together?

So, we developed a social learning platform called Perusall where we have agreements with most publishers, in fact, I think nearly all publishers that people have requested, and what happens is that students read the textbook or the notes or whatever the instructor makes available, and if they have a question they can highlight the part wherever question and it opens a chat window, and pull other people in, it’s actually linked to social media, like Twitter, Facebook or whatever the students happen to use. Then the student uses machine learning, artificial intelligence to analyze students’ engagement, give feedback to the instru
ctor on the students’ engagement on the platform, but also use nudging to get students to participate in this reading, and using a platform. I found that I, for the first time, I can now really design new courses where provided I have a good text, I can completely eliminate the lecture, completely, but it was not easy, even in retrospect I think it’s kind of obvious, yes, you have to make it social because learning is a social experience.

ASSESSMENT, THE SILENT KILLER OF LEARNING

Eric Mazur: I have a talk of assessment, the silent killer of learning because after implementing peer instruction, I realized “yes! I changed the approach to teaching”, but from the student point of view, the really important part is the assessment examination, right? And, if I really want my students to learn, then I should adjust the assessments so that it promotes learning and is, in fact, a learning opportunity, not a punishment, which unfortunately most assessments are. I mean, if you ask some of the students “what do you think about exams?” It’s seen as a stressful event, and stressful events are not the best way to learn. So, I think that not only do we need to change our approaches to teaching, we must also change our approaches to assessment. Education is completely focused on the individual.

Students come to our universities, your students at the Tec, my students at Harvard, they go to classes and many classes they’re sitting next to other students but, you know, the classes are not interactive, well, I think the Tec is probably doing better than many other institutions, but certainly my institution many classes are still lecture-based classes, so, yes, they’re sitting next to other students but not talking to the other students. So it’s alone: they go home, they study alone. They go to an exam, they’re separated from each other, they’re not allowed to talk to each other. They’re not allowed to look up any information, they’re not allowed to look at anything on the internet or nothing. They just have a pen and a piece of paper, and that’s how we examine them, and then we give them a grade and a degree, and we send them to society, and what happens? There, of course, they’re always working together, and they always have access to whatever information they want.

So, in a sense, I think the educational model that most universities in the 21st century are still using is simply not in line with the reality of society, which is collaborative and constant access to changing information. So, I give my students access to information, they can use the internet, I give access to each other, they never take an exam alone, yes, there has to be an individual responsibility, but everything is in teams, and then the team evaluates how everybody has contributed to the team, so that, you know, not everybody just gets the (goal?) team, yeah, right, exactly, but at least students have to learn how to work together and how to use information rather than putting the information in their heads and remembering.

THE FUTURE OF TEACHING

Eric Mazur: Messages, such as the message that we’ve been discussing, at least it gets listened to more, and more people think, “hmm, maybe I should be rethinking what I do in the classroom.” In that respect, I think edX has done a really good job. I’m not a believer in edX at all, I think it does very little, and it has done very little for education, with one exception: people, faculty whose courses put on edX, suddenly start to think, after they’ve put their course on edX, “what’s my role there? What’s my role in the classroom?” So, I hope that 10 years from now more people will start asking themselves, faculty, more instructors, more teachers ask themselves “what is my role in the classroom?” and “maybe I should not just be lecturing and doing things that are easily available on the internet and elsewhere.” That’s my hope for the future.

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