Involve students in big university classes instead of lecturing: Nobel laureate

<p>TORONTO – Physics instructors should get away from university lectures and instead engage students with an approach that involves clicker response questions, small group tasks and class discussion, says Nobel prize winner Carl Wieman.</p> <p>And to do otherwise is “bad teaching,” he says.</p> <p>Wieman and colleagues at the University of British Columbia compared the standard lecture format for classes of 200-plus students with the experimental “deliberate practice” approach for a week on two large sections of an introductory undergraduate physics course.</p> <p>Students in both groups covered the same material during Week 12 of the course and wrote identical tests, but there was better attendance, higher engagement and twice the learning in the section taught using the new approach.</p> <p>”It’s really what’s going on in the students’ minds much more than who’s standing in front of them,” Wieman said from Washington, D.C.</p> <p>The lecture course was led by a highly rated charismatic faculty member, but the experimental course for the week was led by Louis Deslauriers, a trained but inexperienced postdoctoral student, assisted by Ellen Schelew – both co-authors of the study.</p> <p>The research was published Thursday in the journal Science.</p> <p>When asked if the approach should be used in high school and other university-level science classes, Wieman said the methods should be used everywhere.</p> <p>”This is clearly more effective learning. Everybody should be doing it. It should be wholesale transformation,” he said.</p> <p>”You’re practising bad teaching if you’re not doing this. That’s what the data says. It’s high time everybody changed.”</p> <p>Wieman won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of a new form of matter, and is currently on leave from positions at UBC’s Vancouver campus and the University of Colorado. He’s working for the Obama administration as associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.</p> <p>The control class met twice a week for an hour and a half, and the experimental class met three times a week for an hour.</p> <p>Before Week 12, the experimental class also had an experienced instructor who used a lecture style, and both classes were comparable in terms of number of students enrolled, midterm scores, attendance and observations of how engaged they appeared to be.</p> <p>At the end of the week, test scores were 41 plus or minus one per cent in the control section and 74 plus or minus one per cent in the experimental section.</p> <p>Deslauriers said the energy in the class and the excitement of the students made for a great learning environment.</p> <p>”However, one of the consequences of having students work in groups on carefully designed activities and being in this kind of active learning environment is a direct increase in the sophistication of their questions, so as an instructor you really have to be on your toes,” he said from Vancouver.</p> <p>Schelew, a master’s student, said that compared to a lecture setting, the students were engaged and invested in their learning.</p> <p>”Their brains are turned on, they’re thinking hard and they’re really working through these problems. So even if they don’t have enough time to complete a given problem, they are prepared to learn from the instructor feedback that always follows group tasks.”</p> <p>Deslauriers said UBC’s physics and astronomy faculty has responded quite well to the results and agreed to transform some first-year physics courses to the new method.</p> <p>Jason Harlow, a senior lecturer in the physics department at the University of Toronto, said the findings are not surprising, and a lot of the same things – including having students use $50 clickers to answer questions – have been done at U of T for a couple of years. The remote hand-held devices enable students to register their responses to questions posed by the instructor.</p> <p>Harlow noted the study covered just one week of material.</p> <p>”One thing we’ve noticed is whenever you change something it increases student engagement and even student learning during the initial stages of that change,” he said.</p> <p>”Instead of arriving and having the same-old, same-old, there was something to talk about, there was something interesting going on that they had never seen before, and so I think that weakens the results of their study a little bit, in the sense that this is not an ongoing long-term result.”</p> <p>However, he believes that if they can sustain this and do it long term, there are benefits because students become invested when they vote with their clicker and they’re more attentive to explanations because they’re trying to figure out why they were right or wrong.</p> <p>”I do actually believe that this is the right way to teach physics, and probably a lot of other subjects. And that’s why I’m trying to do as many of these things as I can in my lectures.”</p> <p>By way of background, Harlow said a physics research group at the University of Washington began using these methods in the 1990s, and Dickinson College in Pennsylvania has also been a forerunner. He said that when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, went to active learning in the physics department about 10 years ago, it got attention. Harlow travelled with others from U of T to MIT several years ago to see what they were doing.</p> <p>Wieman said lectures have probably been “equally ineffective” for centuries, but now they’ve figured out ways to do it better.</p> <p>”If you look at what a good personal tutor does, or a good apprentice model, they’re doing exactly the same things in terms of giving the person test questions, problems, and giving them feedback,” he said.</p> <p>”This is simply an effort to figure out how to do that in a large classroom.”</p>