Back to the Lecture

T he latter days of August are the warm-up period for the new academic year and a time when professors reorient toward that part of the job which, for many of us, primarily pays our household bills: teaching students. It is a time during which I often contemplate new course content, teaching strategies, and how to make use of innovations that promote what is popularly called " active learning ". These are techniques meant to enhance student engagement in the classroom setting, such as organizing students in small groups that solve problems together on the fly, using peer-to-peer instruction and interactive devices that allow students to ask and answer questions in situbasically anything other than the " traditional lecture " , defined as the situation wherein students sit (or sleep) and listen (or not) while their professor drones on about material they could just as well read about in the comfort of a local café. For those of us who are data-driven, there is reason to give these active learning strategies a good hard look. In an influential study, Freeman et al. meta-analyzed 225 studies that each compared student performance in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses taught exclusively by traditional lecturing or with use of active learning techniques. 1 They found that students in the active learning environments had higher exam scores and lower failure rates than students taught by old-school lectures. Shifting undergraduate STEM teaching to the more active style, the authors speculated, may help staunch the exodus of undergraduates from STEM majors by delivering a better experience earlier in their college education. 2 Even large introductory courses can apparently benefit from use of active learning tools, as evidenced by Walker et al. 3 in their analysis of lectured vs active Biology 1001 students at University of MinnesotaTwin Cities, a class with as many students as its course catalog number. For long-time active learning evangelists, such as physics professor Eric Mazur, these data surely came as no surprise. Years ago, Mazur at Harvard as well as his colleagues down the road at MIT switched their introductory physics classes from traditional lecture style to small groups around a table doing hands-on collaborative work. At MIT, the more senior faculty were at first skeptical and resisted adopting the new style of interactive pedagogy, but younger faculty have embraced the active classroom and, at least for freshman physics, it …