The lecture has been the traditional modality that professors have used to impart their knowledge to students. However, the lecture based learning style may be an anachronistic method given the emerging paradigm of student-centric learning. While the lecture has undoubtedly been used to educate some of history's brilliant thinkers, there are several shortcomings with this method. The amount of information intake an individual has is limited. There is an inherent lack of feedback given the one-way nature of the lecture paradigm. Thus creating genuine dialog within the classroom setting is problematic. There is also the lack of integrating the material on the part of the student; the material is learned, yet the underlying concepts are not.

We, as educators, should be acutely aware of how individuals learn and the superlative methods that allow this action to take place. Central to this awareness is integrating the nature of human abilities and orientations into our teaching methods. Cognitive Scientists have shown that individuals have rather limited short-term memories. Therefore, dragooning students to learn factoids in a lecture may not be the best method for imparting information. Students have become apt at picking out the critical points in a lecture, and then regurgitating them for the papers or tests required. Unfortunately, they often fail to learn how to integrate such material into real-world situations and problems.

Eric Mazur, a Harvard Physics Professor, has noted that peer-to-peer instruction may be far more inductive to learning then the traditional lecture method.

• This method fully engages the student in the material so they are active participants in the learning process rather than information receptacles.

• Asking questions rather than lecturing at students is the premise of the peer-to-peer education paradigm.

• An instructor poses questions and then asks students to respond. The instructor then pairs off students with one another based on divergent answers in order to elucidate their response and convince their peers of their correctness.

In this manner, the student is required to defend their position, but also to listen to their peers' response. More engagement between divergent students is encourage. The professor then asks the students to come to a consensus and asks that they defend their conclusions and how they came to such conclusions. Thus, the students are actively engaging in the material with the professor acting as a guide through the minutia of the process, as opposed to a dictator demanding compliance.

The benefits from this peer-to-peer paradigm are that the instructors receive feedback, students receive feedback, the monotony of the lecture is broken, and the students learn the concepts behind the material. Additionally, the students are able, through defending their positions and learning from one another, to make real-world connections to the concepts taught. Instructors receive feedback as they know which student have read the material, which students have not, and witch students are not garnering the concepts. Students receive feedback from each other and defend their conclusions using critical thinking skills. The "lecture" becomes student-centric as the professors domineering role is eschewed, and practical applications are brought forth to legitimize the student's position. The concepts are no longer abstract academic theorems; rather they become tangible and applicable to real-world settings. Given that the driving force behind students seeking higher education has become less esoteric and more application based, drawing the students into the learning process will enhance the learning experience as well as the ability to utilize such knowledge in their day-to-day lives.  

For further information about peer-to-peer instruction, please see the following website:

http://arts.monash.edu.au/philosophy/peer-instruction/index.php