Lecture/lab mix research results

[Bob Beichner <Beichner@NCSU.edu>]

> > Jerry Lisantti wrote:

> I have had the fortune of teaching Conceptual Physics in the summer where
> we meet every day for 4 hours.  This has worked wonderful since the lab
> and lecture are intermixed. 

John Gastineau, John Risley, and I have been doing similar things in
experimental sections of our Engineering Physics courses for the past four
years and have all kinds of data pointing out the benefits. (There's a
paper on the way if I can ever get it finished...I've got 150 hours of
field notes to analyze!) Students are very happy (of the students in our
two sections last spring, all but one were "Very Satisfied" with the course
with the lone dissenter being merely "Satisfied.") In head-to-head
comparisons with control groups, the experimental students averaged 83% on
problem solving vs 68% for the 600+ other engineers. The FCI results gave a
Hake g factor of 0.53 vs a national average somewhere between 0.22 and 0.24
for traditional courses. The TUG-K results were over 90% compared to
national means around 40%. (This was so amazing that I showed the test to
an international visiting teacher who sat in on each class and specifically
asked if we "taught to the test" before I told him the test results. He
said that we did not.) Attitudes and confidence levels are also very good
relative to the rest of the engineering students. Our groups had been
matched demographically before the semester started. Success rates for
women and minorities have been much better than in our regular sections.

We just got funding from FIPSE to increase the size of our experimental
classes from the current 36 to about 100. It's called the SCALE-UP project
(Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment University Physics...if
you don't have an acronym you can't get funded!) We'll be developing
materials to help ourselves and others teach in a highly collaborative,
technology assisted learning environment. We are scheduling "lecture" and
lab times together and bringing the lab TA's into the classroom so that we
have the same staff requirements, but 3 instructors in the classroom at one
time. We'll use lectures for motivation and organizational purposes, but
the real learning takes place in lots of activities the students work on in
highly structured (and explicitly trained) groups. Sometimes the activities
take a couple of hours, other times just a couple of minutes. But there is
always lots of interaction with the instructors. In a discussion with John
Gastineau a while ago I commented that you walk out of the class either
thinking that this is the best thing to ever hit education or else
realizing that you can't teach at all! He said that the reason for the
bimodal attitude is that this type of teaching gives the instructor really
good insight into what the students are thinking, so you know when they
understand the material and also when they don't. It's not like a lecture
where you're happy if it was well organized and made perfect sense to you
(but possibly only a few of the students).

If anyone is interested in being involved, please let me know. We're
looking for pilot universities where we can help them get started doing
this sort of thing in larger classes, but of course, we'd be happy to help
those schools fortunate enough to teach small classes also. 

Bob