Eric Mazur on Using Technology to Engage Students

Eric Mazur, an optical physicist from Harvard University, recently delivered a lecture at the University of Iowa on "Using Technology to Engage Students."  While Professor Mazur approached the topic from a scientific perspective, I was surprised to discover how much his advice crossed disciplinary boundaries.

Professor Mazur began his lecture by saying flatly, "I love technology."  He listed a few of his favorite items, including his phone, TV, laptop, etc.  "But I have something negative to say about technology," he continued.  Technology is not the magic bullet of pedagogy.  Technology offers no predetermined value or outcome in the classroom.  Historically, he adds, information technology has added very little to pedagogy: blackboards, overhead projectors, TVs and computers do not make one course inherently superior to a course without these tools.  The problem, he says, is that technology tends to be used as a new method to teach old content.  We say the same thing in the same way and expect our students to do better--but the technology alone is not enough to improve learning.  We must not forget about the goals of education, he says, as we implement technology in our classrooms.

What is wrong with the old methods?  Professor Mazur used to give lectures and pass out lecture notes.  However, the students complained that his lectures just repeated the same information on the lecture notes.  "I was just giving them information," he said, "and they could get this information elsewhere."  The ability to get this information elsewhere has become even more relevant in a digital age.  A lecture, Professor Mazur quipped, is just a process by which the professor's lecture notes are translated to the students' notebooks without going through the brains of either.  He describes an alternative to the lecture system--one that uses technology to actually improve pedagogy.

Lecturing, Professor Mazur reminds us, is much older than books.  Books were, in the age of the printing press, a way to use new technology to teach old material.  Gutenberg's press made it possible to spread information and knowledge more quickly, the same way that digital publishing works today.  At first, universities feared books as a competition for the spread of knowledge.  Sometimes we fear technology will do the same, making a university education obselete.  But he reminds us, learning is a social activity, which is why technology never replaces a university education.

Lectures have changed very little over time, despite major changes in technology.  The problem with lectures, Professor Mazur argues, has to do with the assimilation of knowledge.  Students do not learn by just listening.  Students can repeat things by rote, but they cannot grasp concepts fully through lectures alone. 

So what constitutes effective use of technology?  Professor Mazur lists four key criteria:

1) technology furthers the educational goals of the course in question

2) technology facilitates new modes of learning

3) the investment of faculty time and university money in technology is commensurate with returns to student learning, and

4) the technology is reusable and flexible.

We should first begin by asking, What specific educational problems can be addressed by the use of technology?  Professor Mazur suggests how the impersonality of large classes--with nameless lecture halls and faceless assignments--prevents professors from giving individual attention to students.  The instructor is busy lecturing, the student is busy writing, and neither one has time to think.  Because both teacher and student are busy with the first goal of education, the transfer of information, the second step of assimilating this information into one's own experience is overlooked.  Learning is not a spectator sport.  "Students don't learn from listening to us talk, memorizing facts, and spitting them back out," he says; "students need to reflect, talk about, and assimilate this information."  Technology, Mazur suggests, may offer a solution to this problem.

Professor Mazur begins by shifting the transfer of information outside of the classroom.  He recommends Just-in-time teaching (Novak et al) as a guide for making this shift.  In addition to completing a reading assignment, the students are asked to answer two difficult content questions, which require a complex interpretation of the text.  His students earn points for answering the questions in a way that demonstrates that they read rather than for answering the questions correctly.  Students in Professor Mazur's class also say one thing that they found to be challenging in the reading.  He uses these questions as a way to 1) offer personalized instruction to his students outside of class and 2) guide class discussions toward a process of assimilation.

Professor Mazur sorts the student generated questions into three categories: 1) useless questions that do not demonstrate engagement with the reading, 2) brilliant questions that provoke reflection, and 3) small difficulties with the reading.  The useless questions are ignored; however, the other two types of questions are used to achieve the two goals listed above. 

Professor Mazur uses the "brilliant questions" in class discussion to promote assimilation of knowledge.  The basis of Mazur's approach (as described in his book Peer Instruction) is that we should teach by questioning rather than by telling. Using clickers or comparable technology, he poses a question to his class.  The students poll their responses.  If 70%+ answer correctly, he offers a quick recap and moves on.  If less than 30% answer correctly, he offers a slightly longer explanation and then asks similar questions.  If 30-70% answer correctly, he asks students to turn to their neighbor and try to convince one another  which answer is correct.  The law of probability ensures that the students with the correct answer will be more likely to succeed, and the students assimilate the information by talking with one another about it.

Professor Mazur uses the third category of questions, the "small difficulties," to have individualized conversations with particular students.  He emails a reply to the student question, explaining a concept more fully.  Because several students may have the same question, he keeps a "bank" of stock answers to common questions that he can draw from.  In addition, he assembles a FAQ page to distribute to the students, so students who maybe struggled with a small difficulty but didn't ask about it can get the information as well. 

Through these two technologies, applied to these two questions, Professor Mazur achieves his goals of assimilating rather than just transferring knowledge in the classroom and offering his students more individualized instruction.  Though he uses a system developed at Harvard called the "Interactive Learning Toolkit," the basic premise can be easily applied with other forms of technology.  Mazur closed with a compelling claim: "We need education technology," he said, "not information technology."

I find Professor Mazur's teaching approach interesting for several reasons: it engages students, it asks them to collaborate, and it provides real-time feedback.  While humanities classrooms tend to be less driven by "right answer/wrong answer," information-based appraoches, I can definitely see ways that this sytem could translate into my classroom.  When I grade papers, for instance, I sometimes mark individual papers with comma splices and weak thesis statement construction--then, I distribute a sheet to the entire class with fuller explanations of these "small difficulties."  In class, I sometimes poll my students about their impression of a character or a scene.  Though I am not looking for a "right answer," a class discussion can move differently if 90% of students agree with a statement versus 50%.  The idea of beginning with multiple choice approach to an idea does not necessarily limit students to a black and white understanding of that issue, provided that the discussion invites students to think beyond the "right answer."  Having more than one right answer is a way to complicate our students' understanding of the material--and like Professor Mazur says, even in physics, different starting assumptions can mean that there is more than one correct answer. 

For a copy of Professor Mazur's presentation, visit http://mazur-www.harvard.edu.  Also, check out "Response Wear" (either the iPhone/blackberry app or rwpoll.com laptop download), Harvard's "Interactive Learning Toolkit," Just-in-time teaching (Novak et al) and Peer Instruction (Mazur).