There seems to be no end to the flood of conferences, workshops, panel
discussions, reports and research studies calling for change in the
introductory science courses in our colleges and universities. But,
there comes a time to move from criticism to action. In 1993, the
Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation
called for proposals for systemic initiatives to change the way int-
ductory chemistry is taught. One of the five awards was to design,
develop and implement the peer-led Workshop, a new structure to help
students learn science. This book is a study of 15 years of work by the
Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) project, a national consortium of faculty,
learning specialists and students. The authors have been in the thick of
the action as project evaluator (Gafney) and co-principle investigator
(Varma-Nelson). Readers of this book will find a story of successful
change in educational practice, a story that continues today as new
institutions, faculty, and disciplines adopt the PLTL model. They will
learn the model in theory and in practice and the supporting data that
encourage others to adopt and adapt PLTL to new sit- tions. Although the
project has long since lost count of the number of implem- tations of
the model, conservative estimates are that more than 100 community and
four year colleges and a range of universities have adopted the PLTL
model to advance student learning for more than 20,000 students in a
variety of STEM disciplines.