This time, the class broke into their own personal discussions as, again, students entered their new responses into the system.

As the bar graphs which appeared on the hall's video screen instantly showed, the majority of the students had chosen the wrong answer at first; after discussing it with their peers, the class had overwhelmingly corrected themselves and chosen the right answer.

Novel in the sense that students eventually picked the right answer on their own, this exercise also demonstrated something that is all too frequently rare in large science classes: students being forced to interact.

Coffee Talk

Interaction--between the students and the teaching staff, between the students and the professor, and even between the students themselves--distinguishes "Physics 1b" from other science courses.

"I'm really impressed with how hard the professor is trying to make physics more interactive," says Grant P. Christman '00. "It's making it much more interesting."

Indeed, it seems many students share Christman's sentiments. Whereas the "traditional" approach towards teaching large science classes consists of a professor writing equations and topics on the blackboard, Mazur's approach places more emphasis on the students teaching themselves.

To reach this goal, Mazur relied on the concept of peer instruction, a philosophy of teaching large groups of students he has developed over the past decade at Harvard. Rather than just having the professor lecture, peer instruction actively involves students by breaking up brief "mini-lectures" with multiple-choice questions on the topics just covered.