Summarising student-focused outcomes of Physics & Science Education Research
~PER Series, post one: Peer Instruction learning~
The focus of physics education research has been improve how lecturers and teaching staff can improve their teaching, but I was quite fascinated by this and have been reading this and looking at the various academic publications and see what actions us students can take based on the academic research and ‘science of learning’ if you will, to improve how we can understand complex topics, how we can re-ignite the passion for our subjects that drew us to them in the first place that can sometimes be stamped out by monotonous exercise book questions, lecturers that aren’t that interested in lecturing (which I’m lucky enough to so far never have experienced at my institution!), or just from forgetting what it was you loved (I will do a separate post on this specifically!)
This is my first post in a series I plan to focus on different outcomes and studies of Physics Education Research and also Mathematics Education Research, this one is on peer instruction! This applies to many subjects rather than just physics.
One thing that I know has been trialled a lot at my University (and successfully so) has been the concept of Peer-Instruction. It’s no lie when people say that two strengths are better than one, and focused peer instruction can help guide you in understanding topics you don’t understand, realising where you have perhaps come to the right answer but from the wrong methods, and boosting confidence when you’re the one that actually knows the answer and can help explain it to somebody else! One of the key things used in peer-instruction is the concept of first working out your initial answer, then discussing, and then ‘re-voting’. Whilst if you’re trying to do this outside a structured peer-instruction lecture isn’t *exactly* going to work like that, but one thing from a conceptual point of view that I think is important, is this opportunity to ‘revote’ and redecide and review your answer. When you don’t have this and you just come to an answer, then discuss it, you may be more likely to take a defensive view, like “i came to this answer and this is the answer I don’t care what you think” rather than knowing you’re going to re-vote can reframe your thinking in a way that you know you have the opportunity to change you mind, so you’re more likely to have an open-mind in discussions.
Recreating this process in studying with course mates and fellow students can be a good way to improve your learning, and also improving relations with other students. This is different to a casual ‘study group’ which tends to be filled with distraction and more of a social event drinking coffee and talking about irrelevent things (which is also, I note, a good thing to do for your mental and emotional wellbeing!), but adopting a structure of picking a setting some questions to work on, doing them on your own before you meet up, then spend the time discussing each one by one and deciding if you agree, until you come to a fixed conclusion (the object of this exercise is completely and utterly pointless if you’ve looked up an answer sheet before hand), where there is near unanimous agreement throughout the group on the results. Alternatively you can do the questions whilst your in the group setting, on your own, then discuss, then go back again one at a time through the questions together.
This in particularly is a great thing to do in the current online learning thing, because it gives you an excuse to stay in contact with your coursemates and it also makes up for the lack of lectures and tutorials you may be receiving at your university.
It is so critical for the overall learning process to make sure when you see the big complicated really hard problems that ‘no one can solve’ that you just put off as ‘well they gave a really hard exam that year’ or ‘no one else could do that one so it’s fine if I can’t’ to try and tackle those problems [1], and you might be closer than you think to finding the gateway to this by discussing this in groups and using concepts of peer instruction and taking solace in the fact that two heads is almost always better than one.
Ref [1] C.A. Ogilvie (2009) Changes in students’ problem-solving strategies in a course that includes context-rich, multifaceted problems, APS Physics Journal
Ref David E. Pritchard et al. (2009) What Else (Besides the Syllabus) Should Students Learn in Introductory Physics?, APS
