Designing Rubrics for Assessing Higher Order Thinking. Learning Dispositions and Transferable Competences: pedagogy, model... Learning Analytics for C21 Dispositions & Skills. Resources. Eric Mazur on new interactive teaching techniques. In 1990, after seven years of teaching at Harvard, Eric Mazur, now Balkanski professor of physics and applied physics, was delivering clear, polished lectures and demonstrations and getting high student evaluations for his introductory Physics 11 course, populated mainly by premed and engineering students who were successfully solving complicated problems.
Then he discovered that his success as a teacher “was a complete illusion, a house of cards.” The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Mazur tried the test on his own students. Some soul-searching followed.