The benefits to learning from interpersonal interactions are older than Socrates. In the modern era, educators have embraced structured, peer-led methods as a popular high impact practice. This year’s Pimentel Awardee deserves high marks for contributions to developing, promoting, supporting, and understanding these methods in widespread and diverse settings. The Peer-Led Study Group (PLSG) program at the University of Michigan was initiated by the department of chemistry in 1992, and was inspired by a graduate student initiative at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1970s. Now a college-wide program administered by the Science Learning Center, PLSGs are a supplemental instruction option, attracting thousands of students in our foundational STEM courses, and employing hundreds of peer facilitators each term. We recently strengthened the attachment of PLSGs to the chemistry department by creating a required, 1-credit “teaching chemistry” course for the 60-90 facilitators in the organic chemistry courses. We see these student leaders as members of an integrated instructional workforce that includes faculty and graduate student instructors. In this talk, I will describe a study in which we investigated whether or not this course was effective in intercepting and correcting facilitators’ misunderstandings, preventing the propagation of subject matter errors in the PLSGs. <br/>

Attending to the subject

255th National Meeting (2018)

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