The CWSEI group at UBC gets together every week to discuss a journal article. This week, it was a new article by Melissa Dancy and Charles Henderson “Pedagogical practices and instructional change of physics faculty,” Am. J. Phys. 78 (2010).

One of the questions explored in the paper is, why don’t physics faculty members adopt the research-based instructional strategies that so many have already heard of? Mazur-style peer instruction (PI) using clickers, for example.

Dancy & Henderson discovered that nearly two-thirds (64%) of the 722 faculty who completed their survey were familiar with PI and 29% actually used it in their classes. But on further probing, it turned out only 27% of that 29% (we’re down to about 8% now) had students discussing ideas and solving problems multiple times per class. It appears that a lot of physics faculty members equate “peer instruction” with “yeah, I’ve got clickers in my class.” The technology is there but it’s not being implemented in a way that promotes learning. Continue reading →