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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.พ. 2025
- Eric Mazur: "I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material. Who was to blame? The students? The material? I will explain how I came to the agonizing conclusion that the culprit was neither of these. It was my teaching that caused students to fail! I will show how I have adjusted my approach to teaching and how it has improved my students' performance significantly." Eric Mazur is the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. An internationally recognized scientist and researcher, he leads a vigorous research program in optical physics and supervises one of the largest research groups in the Physics Department at Harvard University.
An 18-minute version of this presentation is available here: • Eric Mazur, Abridged "...
![Assessment: The Silent Killer of Learning / Eric Mazur [Dudley Herschbach Teacher/Scientist Lecture]](/img/n.gif)
Lucky of me, today I heard this talk from Dr. Mazur in person at Harvard. Indeed he's so brilliant and willing to share knowledge and experience. Thank you.
Great presentation!
- Encouraging students to immediately apply new knowledge in discussion and short quiz.
- Reduce amount of content in order to free up some time for digging deeper and improving understanding.
- Rigorous testing of teaching techniques.
"It's not about remembering the information, it is about using the information" 1:19:17
Professor Mazur has learned about the strengths of the Socratic Method that law schools in the US have been using for decades. In law school we read the material before class and in class we discussed among ourselves the analysis. The whole purpose was to (1) teach you how to think and (2) prepare you for a lifetime of self-learning. Starting in the private practice of law you will learn as much on your own in a month as you got in three years of law school.
Ironically, this is one of the best lectures of all time!
Regarding labs, they're a waste of time.
Fantastic presentation. I don't agree that we should simply take the professor out of the loop and simply have the students teach each other. Having a "conversation" between the student and the professor should be the best option.
That's not what he said, nor what he does. I suggest you watch it all over again.
perfect argument..I am a mathematician. All my students scare of math.. but it is a requirement. What happen i encourage them that math is an easy subjects..so I change my teaching behavior.. the way of teaching 25 student to have the same mentality to wards solving problem. therefore at the end.... all their response are perfectly identical. everyone happy, instead of teaching 25 students i am teaching one students.
Very interesting comments about Lab vs. Peer instruction at 1:11:00. I have been talking about that with my colleagues. Lab work does not necessarily equate to learner centered instruction.
loved this! wish i went to his presentation!
Brilliant, I wish you'd been one of my lecturers.
Thank you so much!
My physics teacher tried this exact method on our class and it worked wonderfully well. I highly recommend it. As a student who never got anything from conventional teaching, this was a breath of fresh air. Teachers, do it!
It depends on the course and its difficulty. But in general I'd say that aiming for 95% understanding is a good idea. For the more difficult courses (mostly math) I've found it extremely hard to learn such a large amount of material in such a short period of time. There is no time to think about the material or to properly "digest" it. My mistake was believing that I could skip certain topics because they seemed too hard and still pass the exam. Now I know better.
This is the method my instructor used when I was at BYU in 2002. Must have gotten from Dr. Mazur. Used it a bit with my high school students for biology. I need to improve my methods more though.
Learning is when student asks the right questions.
Most students don't ask questions. =)
Asking the right questions is actually more difficult than answering them, imo. Socratic method can be useful, but I do believe it has its limitations in learning and understanding.
Great lecture, ironically!
come to York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and give your presentation to the professors that teach at YorkU!!!!
As a uni student myself (EE), it feels satisfying to hear him put into words what I have been feeling for a long time.
Lectures are one-way, and it's difficult to digest and get feedback on what one is supposed to learn in such a short period of time.
Advice to uni students: Don't feel stressed out, don't bother going to an exam unless you feel confident you understand atleast 95% of the course material; if you don't, the exam will just be a waste of your time.
Just my experience.
So this guy figured out what every single student already knows?
Description of how Harvard students couldn't do the conceptual DC circuit question was the funniest thing ever!
***** and faved! Love it! Word!
I would love to hear this. Does anybody else has this issue? I can hear him being introduced, then there is no sound from him as he speaks.
Must hear...
@brzoskwinka18: It's not the amount of information, it's the type. Stop feeding huge amounts of redundant data and hope the students build a model of it themselves, and focus on letting the students build the model.
Does any have a copy in arabic
I laughed and laughed starting at 33:30. It's actually scary that these future doctors couldn't even solve a simple DC circuit problem.
Its strange that whenever there is someone speaking about effective learning they say that we should actually reduce the amount information that we want to process
I don't think it's reducing the amount of information. It's just admitting that most of the learning has to happen outside of class
There seems to be a bit of a problem with the data he reports on. If I understand this correctly, he suggests that his students, who were taught in a traditional lecture format performed more poorly at conceptual problems than the more conventional problems (where they can just know the formula and plug in the numbers). So he starts using more active learning strategies in classroom and shows that incredibly their capabilities at conceptual problems gets better. The confound, however, is that he seems to be devoting more time in class teaching them about conceptual problems. So it could be the active learning, or it could simply be that he is devoting more time to teaching about conceptual problems. To truly evaluate this method, you would have to compare a traditional lecture format and a more active learning format where the same amount of time was devoted to teaching conceptual level knowledge.
The whole point is to teach concepts so that's not a confounder but the goal. Should teaching concepts work without teaching concepts? I don't understand. He showed that *both* conceptual knowledge as well as problem solving improved. What wasn't said was if there was an overall increase in effort and there very well may be. If the students had to spend more time, we don't know from this lecture. However, it doesn't matter unless there is a larger problem that now overall course load is too much. That would only show that previously shortcuts were taken, at the cost of comprehension of the material that was taught, in order to get results that looked better than they were. So it does not really matter what happened to overall effort, it's just about the goals, how much did conceptual knowledge as well as problem solving improve - with the former here being the focus because that had turned out to be a big problem, while problem solving, using "recipes", always at worked, at least on the surface.
You want want to check out the book called Make It Stick. This lecture is reference there. They talked about lots of different studies
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It appears the speaker has discovered good habits of an elementary school teacher. This is why those who teach college classes would benefit from being trained to be an educator. Yes, I know the classes are secondary to their research...
Professors do not equal teachers!
Very strong doughts about this "Mazur pedagogical theory". Not that participation is not a good thing, it is, but the poor results the students were showing mainly comes from the catastrophic pedagogical strategy that started in the US after WWII and destroy all the foundations not only in science, but in cognitive abilities, thinking, reasoning, writing and speling... Normal students with a normal solid background have little pb asimilating new datas, they are eager to lurn and fight with tough subjects. So as an indian master puts it, don't search in ill people the functioning of mind, but ask enlighted yogis!
does anyone else think it is funny that he gives a lecture about how lectures are bad?
It's a major problem in this sector. People know they should be doing something different, but many of them don't know HOW to do it different.
and used over 80 minutes to deliver it? Yes.
The jokers who put this together forgot to 'mike up' the speaker!!
Hi junlan
My left ear is fatigued
Here is a thought: If students who have learned the material teach better than the professor himself, due to the professor having less of a comprehension of what "issues" the student is going through, then we should take the next step. Have students who have already taken the course, TEACH the course. Take professors out of the loop completely!
what is this
TL:DW
It doesn't matter who teaches? Hire a janitor. Internal validation always beats external motivation. Why are we listening to you if your teaching will benefit me no more than listening to your student?
Lol yes
Although I did enjoy this, I find it ironic; a "converted lecturer" giving an hour and 20 minute lecture.
lol so long :D
His point would've been made far more easily, had he used some sort of tool (Wooclap, QuizzBox, etc.) to interact with the audience. 80 minutes of irony could've been avoided with a few minutes of interaction.
This video is appalling. In a 1:20 long talk he gets to his real point around :52. It's a good point, but the material before that is mostly data-free fluff. He's up there preening with no consideration for his audience. Inexcusable.
Here is a thought: If students who have learned the material teach better than the professor himself, due to the professor having less of a comprehension of what "issues" the student is going through, then we should take the next step. Have students who have already taken the course, TEACH the course. Take professors out of the loop completely!