Readers of this blog will know I am a fan of using
peer instruction in teaching and I am happy to say that, as of this week, I am using peer instruction instruction in all the courses I contribute to. This week I covered DFT in our Computational Chemistry course (which is the only week I currently contribute).
In the past I have always lectured, straight from the DFT section in my book, which the students get a copy of beforehand; all because I simply couldn't think of good multiple choice questions. But now I use
Socrative for polling, which has a very nifty "short answer" option: I ask a question, the students discuss and type in their answer, once finished they then get to vote for their favorite answer, and, once finished, I discuss some of the answers (including why some answers are wrong). You can see the questions I asked above.
Of course this means the students have to prepare for class beforehand. I had them read the electron correlation and DFT sections from my book,
a perspective article by Kieron Burke, and the DFT chapter from
Frank Jensen's book. In addition they had to watch
David Sherrill's video lecture on DFT:
I am very happy with the way the process went. I'll definitely do it this way from now on.
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