Why Do Faculty Try Research Based Instructional Strategies?

As part of a larger ongoing study of physics faculty, we report on analysis of 15 interviews with Peer Instruction (PI) users. The analyses presented here address the following two research questions 1) How did PI users come to know about PI? and 2) What reasons do PI users give for first trying PI? In this paper we describe how faculty were first exposed to PI, and the avenues faculty used to subsequently learn more about PI such as workshops, informal discussions with colleagues, reading journal articles, etc. We also describe reasons that faculty give for initially trying PI such as dissatisfaction with lecture methods, easy trialability of PI, or their intuitive sense that PI was a better way to teach. Following a summary of our findings, we discuss implications for dissemination.