STEM education“Active Physics” incorporates active-learning techniques while still being taught to large classes
Large lecture courses notoriously discourage students from going into the sciences, but an innovative physics course helps to prevent this first-year slide. “Active Physics” incorporates active-learning techniques, but still is taught to large classes. Active Physics consistently outperformed traditional lecture courses in conceptual learning and in attitudes toward learning and problem solving.
“Physics summer work, please help!!!” a post on Yahoo Answers begins. “I cant [sic] figure out how to do this anywhere!!! Best answer awarded [sic]? Need help immediately!!!!!”
Queries like this make people who love teaching science cringe. It is not that they think the students are “cheating” by trying to Google the answer, but rather that they know students who ask this kind of question are learning nothing — and probably confirming a secret conviction that they are bad at science.
That attitude is one of the toughest obstacles science teachers face. It gathers speed in high school, when students often are defined as smart if they get the right answer quickly — by any means possible. In many cases, an introductory college science class is the last chance educators have to fix the perception that getting the answer is everything.
Unfortunately, these are often large lecture classes that, research shows, drive steep attitudinal declines toward learning and problem solving in the sciences.
A Washington University release reports that a three-year evaluation of an innovative Washington University in St. Louis course suggests the attitudinal decline is not inevitable. Offered by the Department of Physics in Arts & Sciences, “Active Physics” incorporates active-learning techniques, but still is taught to large classes.
The results, published in the 2 July issue of Physical Review Special Topics, show that the course has the expected benefits in conceptual learning and retains some, although not all, of the attitudinal benefits of small, inquiry-based courses.
Although results were mixed, Active Physics consistently outperformed traditional lecture courses in conceptual learning and in attitudes toward learning and problem solving, said Regina F. Frey, Ph.D., the Florence E. Moog Professor of STEM Education, who co-led the evaluation team.
“What’s more, ‘Active Physics’ eliminates what is typically a big gender gap in attitudinal declines in traditional introductory physics courses,” said Frey, who also is executive director of the university’s Teaching Center and associate professor of chemistry in Arts & Sciences. “Women’s attitudinal scores still decline in ‘Active Physics,’ but much less than they do in traditional lecture courses.”
The bottom line is that active learning works for large classes, Frey said. “People like to say, ‘Well, of course you can implement active learning if you have classes of 40 or 50 or with a specific instructor,’” she said. “But they’re skeptical that it will work in larger classes. What the evaluation showed is that the gains
