Title: Peer Instruction 2.0: The Next Generation of Catalyzing Learner Engagement in STEM Classrooms
Group Meeting Date & Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 @ 2:00 pm
Location: Biology Building, 68-180
Dr. Julie Schell and Dr. Brian Lukoff are both Postdoctoral Fellows in Professor Eric Mazur’s Physics Education Research Group at Harvard University. Dr. Schell received her Doctorate in May of 2009 from Teachers College at Columbia University and has an M.S. in Counseling and Educational Psychology with an emphasis in Instructional Technology from the University of Nevada at Reno. Her dissertation, “Venturing Toward Better Teaching: S.T.E.M. Professors’ Efforts to Improve Their Introductory Undergraduate Pedagogy at Major Research Universities” was selected as the 2009 Dissertation of the Year from the American Educational Research Association, Postsecondary Education Division. Dr. Schell’s current research laboratory is the undergraduate STEM classroom, where she investigates the assessment, diffusion and uptake of pedagogical innovation across the globe. She is an expert in Peer Instruction, an evidence-based teaching method developed by Eric Mazur and is the Co-Founder of Peer Instruction Network, a global community of Peer Instruction users. She is also the co-author of the Peer Instruction Self Efficacy instrument, which she and her collaborators are using to build models for identifying at-risk students and design interventions for enhancing student learning and success in undergraduate and graduate classrooms. Her work to drive educational change extends beyond Harvard; she is part of a leadership team at The University of Texas at Austin focusing on the power of innovative pedagogy to improve student success in higher and postsecondary education across the State of Texas. She is also an associate of the LASPAU-Initiative for the Development of Academic Innovation (IDIA). For IDIA, Dr. Schell focuses specifically on assessment of student learning and the diffusion of pedagogical innovation in Latin America.
Dr. Brian Lukoff received his Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and Technology Design from the Stanford University School of Education, where he studied the use of technology to improve assessment and measurement; his dissertation received the Brenda H. Loyd Outstanding Dissertation Award from the National Council on Measurement in Education. He also holds an M.S. in statistics from Stanford University and a B.A. in mathematics from Cornell University. Dr. Brian Lukoff’s research focuses on developing technology to drive formative assessment and student engagement, particularly in large lecture classes. He is also the CEO and co-founder of Learning Catalytics, a company that is commercializing the interactive teaching technology developed in the Mazur Group and making it available to instructors both in K-12 and higher education. In addition to his research work, he is also co-founder and Chief Education Scientist of Spatial Thoughtware, a company that develops a Java-based curriculum for teaching 2D and 3D computational geometry to high-school students. Before coming to Harvard, Dr. Lukoff was a software engineer at adap.tv, a video advertising startup in Silicon Valley, where he worked to develop technology to process, analyze, and help stakeholders make sense of large-scale data.
