Adapting a Popular Technique in College Lecture Halls to K-12 Classrooms

摘要

Peer Instruction (PI) (Mazur, 1997) is an increasingly popular technique to facilitate student discussion with handheld student-response technology, that is, "clickers." During PI, students use clickers to anonymously vote on questions that teachers project to the front of the room. PI incorporates clicker votes into a feedback loop (see Figure 1). More specifically, clicker technology allows teachers to quickly compile each student vote, and then teachers project to students a display of class-wide voting trends. Teachers then ask their students to discuss their voting rationales with peers, and then after several minutes of peer discussion, teachers ask students to revote on the same question with the overarching goal of reaching classroom consensus. If the classroom does not reach consensus, the PI cycle repeats. Evidence indicates this PI cycle is associated with statistically significant improvements in conceptual understanding over traditional lecture instruction (Crouch and Mazur 2001; Fagen, Crouch, and Mazur 2002).