Active Learning Beats Lectures in a College Physics Class

CME presented as didactic lectures don't change practice behavior, and most of the time, they do little to improve knowledge.  So why are they used so often?  I think people use lectures partly because that's the way they learned in college, so they think it must work.  The problem though, is that college is a completely different situation because college students have to recall information on tests.  This means that they often use a variety of techniques to help them remember the information in a lecture.  Professionals don't have to pas high stakes tests (at least not for most CME), so they won't go through that extra work. 

Lectures aren't always the best way to learn, even in college.  A recent article in Science (hat tip to Donald Clark) compared learning in a physics class sections taught in two different ways.  The first was taught by an experienced, highly-rated lecturer, and the second, was used methods developed from learning theory, and was taught by a graduate assistant with no teaching experience.   This class used a variety of interactive methods based on the idea of deliberate practice.

"Deliberate practice takes the form of a series of challenging questions and tasks, that require the students to practice physicist-like reasoning and problem-solving during class time while provided with frequent feedback." 

The goal was to have students spend their time learning to reason and think like scientists, rather than simply being given facts.  It's important to note that both classes used clickers, and even used many of the same clicker questions, but the lecture-based class used them more like a post instruction assessment, rather than a way to start discussion and keep it going. 

The graduate assistant didn't lecture, he presented the problems, and gave guidance and explanations.  He also responded to student's answers for the clicker questions and to things that he heard during the student discussions. 

The results were uniformly positive.  The active learning group had higher attendance, higher levels of engagement, and most importantly, twice the learning of the group that received the lectures. 



Active learning, centered around problems can easily be incorporated into CME activities.  In fact, given the fact that these active learning experiments are more enjoyable for students, and more likely to result in better learning outcomes, it's hard to come up with reasons not to at least try them. 

Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew, and Carl Wiemann (2011), Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class, Science 332:862-864.  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6031/862.abstract