Distinguished Scientist Lecture topic: Student-faculty partnerships for learning

Pratibha Varma-Nelson, professor of chemistry and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), will give the spring Distinguished Scientist Lecture at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, March 27, in Emerson Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. Titled “PLTL:  A Student-Faculty Partnership for Transforming the Learning Environment,” the talk is free and open to the public.

Varma-Nelson is known in the STEM education community for her pioneering work in development, implementation and dissemination of the Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) model of teaching, which provides students with opportunities for intellectual and personal development, as well as a restructuring of their content knowledge. This approach preserves the lecture and introduces a new structure, a weekly two-hour workshop where students interact to solve problems under the guidance of a trained peer leader.

Thursday’s presentation will provide an overview of the model, introduce its theoretical and practical elements, and describe how technology can be used to promote cyber learning through PLTL. Cyber PLTL (cPLTL) is an online, synchronous, collaborative environment for conducting PLTL workshops. Training of students and peer leaders to work effectively in PLTL workshops will be discussed as well.

Varma-Nelson was a co-principal investigator of two National Science Foundation-funded national dissemination grants awarded to the PLTL project. Her team at IUPUI is working on developing, implementing, evaluating, and disseminating cPLTL in general chemistry and organic chemistry. The cPLTL workshops foster development of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. PLTL and cPLTL workshops are being used to  research student and peer leader behaviors in face-to-face and online environments. Peer leader behavior and peer leader-student discourse in the cyber and face-to-face environments of both Organic Chemistry and General Chemistry PLTL programs are being systematically examined to explore the differences in leadership style of the peer leaders in the two learning settings. Varma-Nelson is also studying the effectiveness of exporting pedagogies developed in chemistry to other STEM disciplines.