Hockings et al. (2018) write: “Over recent months and years, the balance between contact hours and independent study time has been one focus of attention, the underlying assumption being that fewer contact hours means poorer value for money and lower quality learning experience“. And that assumption is super common! But: “The number of contact hours measures […]
Ramp & Hummels (2025) describe the peer-consultation method “carousel“, “a method to facilitate the exchange of perspectives of different actors working in parallel on different challenges“: Each presenter gets 30 minutes to present a project and ask 2-4 peers for input and feedback.
Somehow a print of the “Formative assessment and self‐regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006) article ended up on my desk. I don’t know who wanted me to read it, but I am glad I did! See my summary below.
Have you ever worked as student tutor? Then you’ve probably felt like you understood the content of the course you tutored a million times better after tutoring it. Or at least that’s what I hear over and over again: People feel like they understood a topic. Then they prepare to teach it, and realise how […]
It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that how you behave as an instructor influences how your students work during peer instruction phases. But do you know what you can do to make sure that student discussions are reaching the level of critical thinking that you want? I.e., how do you construct classroom […]
Make sure it stays silent during the first step of the clicker process. When using clickers in class, there are many different possible ways of implementing clicker questions and peer instruction, for example the Mazur sequence (which is our default sequence) and the Physics Education Research Group at UMass (PERG) sequence. Let’s recall: The Mazur […]
On different approaches to peer-instruction and why one might want to use them. Having sat in many different lectures by many different professors over the last year, and having given feedback on the methods used in most of those lectures, I find myself wondering how we can define a standard or even best practice for […]
Why does learning through peer instruction work? As you might have noticed by now, I’m a big fan of concept questions combined with “talk to your neighbor” peer instruction. And studies show that talking to your neighbor is often more successful in teaching you new things than listening to the lecturer is. In their paper […]
