Reno Reporter

Two professors with the University of Nevada, Reno have established a peer instruction program that will allow students to become mentors to their peers.

According to a news release shared by the university, Professor Elena Pravosudova and Teaching Associate Professor Pamela Sandstrom created the Biology Peer Instruction Program.

“Since 2008, nearly 500 undergraduates have collectively held over 1,200 leadership positions and helped us build a successful Peer Instruction Program,” Pravosudova said in the release.

The program will allow students who are pillars in the classroom to provide feedback to incoming students so that they can become familiar with content within the course.

“We try to teach them what we have learned over the years," Sandstrom said. "I feel a lot of that has come from the College of Science allowing us to get professional development, allowing us to go to those UTeach conferences, allowing us to go to those Learning Assistant Alliance conferences, and then we share all that knowledge with our peer instructors.”

A lot of the students involved in the program will go on to medical school by utilizing a flipped-classroom design.

“I call it a win-win-win," Pravosudova said. "We get help teaching our students and engaging them. The students get help from peers, as it is always good for someone to explain it in a different way than the professor who might have a different learning style. And for the peer leaders, it’s the experience, it’s the connections. And just pragmatically, they’re exposed to the same content over and over again, so when they take any standardized test, they just kill it.”