Inspirations from Eric Mazur

Yesterday afternoon I was watching a really nice talk given by Eric Mazur, professor at Harvard University, in the Physics department. I knew about it thanks to my colleague Mar's twitter (@marimar_ps), but I was pointed to Eric's work before in September, by Al Essa (@malpaso) at the ECTEL'12 conference.  Here is the video: let's watch it and then discuss about it.

At the beginning of the video, Eric talk about something I've already noticed in academia: some excellent researchers forget about scientific method in their teaching, and they are not consequent with data facts in the classroom. As Eric wisely paraphrases: "the plural of anecdote is not data"; in other words, as teachers we have to look at the data that arises after our interventions in the class and should make sense of it in order to improve our teaching, make future interventions, etc. Eric is selling the learning analytics product with a different wrapping.

After this nicely done introduction, he explains 3 examples of his usage of data in the class, examples that result quite different from a first intuition. The first one is about the gender knowledge gap for the current instruction methodologies, and that he claims it could be flattened by means of collaborative methodologies. I really don't like much this example since the assessment methodology used to measure students knowledge (standardized tests) could also affect the results in a different way for both genders.

The second example is about demos: Eric demonstrates the inefficacy of just doing a demo in class without previous thinking about the expected results and discussion with colleagues. Really neat, and something I will take into account in the future. And another nice advice in this part: when a teacher is grading a student exercise/exam he should not only indicate what was good/bad but also try to think how the students reached to that conclusion in order to avoid this kind of failures in the future. At this point, someone in the audience pointed out the importance of formative feedback.

Finally, the last topic and my favorite one was confusion. Was confusion bad for students? If there were no confusion maybe means that there was no learning at all. Not always non-confused students obtained the best results. In fact, students that did bad in a exam were not aware of their deficiencies: they thought that they were not confused at all because they didn't even have started to understand the subject, and they didn't pose the right questions to themselves. Therefore, this awareness information is a very powerful tool that should be given as fast as possible to the students for them to understand their deficiencies and be able to conduct their learning path. And if this information is backed up with strong, reliable data... the better.