Presentation:

The traditional large lecture class, even when entertainingly taught, may not achieve the goals of the course: namely, to transfer long-term knowledge to students and to affect their worldview. There are structural problems that inhibit the widespread adoption of good principles of teaching and learning. Some of these are particular to the sciences, but they all come into play with large classes in any discipline. The faculty in any department where the culture and reward structure favor research over instruction have disincentives to innovation. In a small department there may only be one person who is up to date on best pedagogical practices. The graying professoriate has a growing disconnect with the technology and computer habits of their undergraduates. In most large lecture situations, there is limited support (one GTA for a class of 100 or more), and limited opportunity to break the class into small groups. How do we engage students and encourage learning in these conditions?

Learner-Center Teaching

The premise of this presentation is that professor-centered lectures, no matter how well crafted and how entertaining, can only go so far in helping students learn (Bridges and Desmond, 2000). The most effective courses are learner-centered courses where learning goals are clearly stated and are commensurate with the methods of evaluation, where interactive techniques are used to continually engage students, and where assessment is used to tune the strategies to the particular context of each course, each professor and each set of students (Angelo and Cross, 1993). There is no “one size fits all” in learner-centered education.

Most professors are familiar with the ugly little pact that can develop in the classroom. They agree to be highly structured in their presentation and not to ask students to think outside the box, and they evaluate according to the material in the textbook and objective tests, usually multiple choice. In return, the students agree not to be disruptive, to act as receptacles for information, and to regurgitate the information reliably when it is time for a test. All of this is implicit. As long as nobody questions the premise, everyone is happy. This description is a caricature, but not by much.

Imagine that you call your students to attention and read them the following: “It’s very important that you learn about traxoline. Traxoline is a brand new form of zionter. It is montilled in Ceristanna. The Ceristannians gristerlate large amounts of fevon and then brachter it to quasel traxoline. Traxoline may well be one of our most lukized snezlaus in the future because of our zionter lescelidge.” Suitably primed, students might well be able to answer a series of questions about the mythical substance traxoline, but it would be the ultimate empty exercise (an unpublished example from Judy Lanier). Traditional lectures can appear effective if unexamined. Learner-centered techniques are awkward because they require faculty to relinquish some authority and control in the classroom. Peer learning shifts the locus and responsibility for learning toward the student, which is always good! Unfortunately, innovative teaching techniques can evaluate lower, at least initially, so both faculty and heads of department need to be committed to the larger goal of improving learning.

Student Misconceptions

Even when they are seeing your subject for the first time, students are not blank sheets of paper when they come into the classroom. Particularly in the sciences, students often hold strong misconceptions, as illustrated by a quote from the NRC Report How People Learn: “Students enter your lecture hall with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not properly engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for the purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom” (National Research Council, 2000).

Of course preconceptions are not always misconceptions, and therein lies a complication. Children know that it gets hotter when you approach a burner on the stove, they know that a car’s horn sounds louder when it is approaching, and they know that a car headlight gets brighter when it drives towards them. In all of these situations, close means more and it becomes a strongly held perception about the way the world works. But this knowledge may not be helpful in a quite different situation, in astronomy. It is not hotter in summer because we are closer to the Sun, and the brightest stars in the sky are not the hottest. In these cases, the knowledge has to be constructed in new circumstances and that cannot be done without addressing the student’s pre-existing basis for physical intuition (Comins, 2001; Hufnagel, 2002; Bailey and Slater, 2003).

Pedagogical Principles

Even with the temptations for instructors and students to buy into a teaching model based on passivity and regurgitation of information, there is plenty of evidence that traditional methods are not working. Students often find traditional science courses to be boring, irrelevant, and incongruous with the stated goals (Tobias, 1991). Research into learning and cognition confirms that knowledge is associative, and thus linked to prior mental models (Gabel, 1994). It also shows that learning is context-dependent; what students learn depends on the educational setting. In addition, it shows that students require social interactions to learn deeply and effectively. Finally, it shows that constructive learning requires mental effort—proper pedagogy is difficult both for faculty and students!

It is useful to think of teaching in terms of a progression of four models of pedagogy. At one extreme is the highly traditional (and often stifling) model where information flows solely from the instructor and the textbook. The learner is a recipient of information. This model adheres to behaviorist principles of psychology. Next is a model where students are active participants and the instructor often acts as a facilitator. A classroom operating this way would have a lot of hands-on labs or experiments, small group discussions, and peer instruction. There is still a lot of structure in such a course, but students get to shape the small-scale learning environment. In terms of cognitive theory, this is cognitivism, where the learner is often self-directed and a lot of time is spent problem-solving. As the Chinese aphorism goes, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I’ll remember, involve me and I’ll understand.”

It has been an enormous struggle for higher education to move between the first and second models of learning, yet there are two more transitions that can be contemplated.
The third is what might be called an adaptive learning environment, where the tools of the instruction and even the shape of the course are molded by students. The content is made up of reusable learning objects that can be arranged in different sequences, in contrast to the linear flow of a textbook. This type of instruction is characterized by exploration and cooperation and the basis in learning theory is constructivism. A final step in this direction would be peer-to-peer learning, with extensive use of blogs and wikis, co-creation of learning materials by students, and the instructor as a coordinator. Somewhere between the “fascism” of traditional instruction and the “anarchy” of pure peer-to-peer environments lies the sweet spot of effective instruction.

Inquiry-Based Methods

By contrast with traditional methods, active engagement or active learning approaches produce significant and long-lasting learning gains compared to even the most spirited lectures (NSTA, 2002; Bybee, 2002; Hake, 1997). Active learning occurs when students have to take responsibility for participating in and monitoring of their own learning by engaging in critical reasoning about the ideas presented in the class. Techniques to encourage active learning include the following:

• Ask students questions to frame a discussion. Raise a controversial or topical issue. Use demonstrations or interactive lecture demonstrations.
• Give surprise quizzes (they don’t need to be graded to be effective), but always screen questions to test higher order thought processes in a Bloom taxonomy.
• Use personal responders (also called “clickers”) for misconception testing, opinion polling. Note cards or other low-tech methods can be used. It is easy to involve all students because the polling can be anonymous, and the feedback to both students and instructor is immediate (Duncan and Mazur, 2005).
• Have students do short writing assignments in class. They can be asked to address the “muddiest point” or summarize the day’s main points.
• Find video clips, songs, or references to the popular culture to ground material in student’s everyday lives and engage different learning styles.
• Use peer instruction techniques such as “think-pair-share” or interactions in small groups such as “concept tests” or “lecture tutorials” where students get nuggets of instruction and then engage the material as a group by responding to one or more questions that address misconceptions.
• Employ undergraduates as preceptors, where they take a leadership role and help other students with their learning, in class and out of class, and help with activities or extra credit events. At most universities they can do this either for credit or for a modest stipend. If properly prepared and trained, there should be no fear of the “blind leading the blind” and preceptors are much closer to the typical student in the class than a professor or TA, so they can better understand their learning difficulties.
• Have students conduct debates, either individual or in a group. Use role-playing; students can be asked to behave as particles, genes, planets, or even stars. Whole class discussions can be effective if used judiciously.
• Have students construct “concept maps” where they have to define relationships between all the concepts in one topic of the course.
• Employ portfolio assessment. In a portfolio, students build a suite of written work over the entire course, getting feedback and interim grades on each part. Some of the components of the portfolio can be customized to their particular interests.

Even if lectures are still the primary delivery vehicles, they can easily include several of these techniques, so that inquiry-based instruction can be introduced incrementally or in stages. The advantages of any of these techniques are that student misconceptions are explicitly identified, the instructor is better paced, and the students are more engaged with the class. For instance, an interactive demo could be preceded by a short quiz with clickers or note cards to identify the most common misconceptions about the demo topic. Alternately, the class could be asked to briefly write their expectations for an upcoming demo on a card, and then the cards are passed around to mix them up. Sample responses can then be read out before the demo is begun.

Simple “show and tell” is very effective if it makes students think more deeply about the material. In astronomy, an iron meteorite can be used to spark discussion. It is an example of a messenger from trillions of miles away and billions of years ago because its material was ejected from a star before the Earth was born. In biology, a package of dental floss in a red plastic Easter egg makes a good scale model of a red blood cell and can be used to convey the vast information content of DNA. Pass the egg around the class and unravel the floss: 5 kilometers of it would be the length of DNA in a human cell. Students could imagine information written on it like the “book of life” where a sentence is the length of a gene and the smallest unit of information, a base pair, is a fraction of a millimeter.

Many companies and individuals have developed resources that can help increase student engagement and learning. Some are associated with prominent textbooks and so are free to adopters of the books, while others are available on the Web; in particular see the MERLOT repository. Textbook-linked activities are often excellent because publishers see them as a way to gain comparative advantage in the competitive marketplace and they can invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in applets and interactive tutorials.

In astronomy, there are sophisticated Java applets for introductory astronomy courses that essentially allow students to behave like real scientists—taking realistic but synthetic data with plausible errors, varying parameters, and fitting models. Examples include detecting extrasolar planets with Doppler velocity data (Bothun) and modeling changes in chemical composition of planetary atmospheres and their effects on climate (McCray). A new book of feedback questions/discussion prompts is aimed specifically at introductory astronomy courses (Adams, Prather, and Slater, 2004); the same group has collected strategies for teaching large astronomy classes (Slater and Adams, 2003; see also Pompea, 2000). Also, ranking tasks and peer instruction methods have been documented (Green, 2003). Newer ideas like concept maps do not yet have research to back up their effectiveness (see the IHMC Cmap tools). Portfolio assessments, while labor-intensive for the instructor, are usually popular with students because of the high degree of feedback and customization (Danielson and Abrutyn, 1997).

The Role of Technology

The ancient Greek philosophers were right: The best form of instruction is the Socratic dialog. Since then, there have only been two revolutions in the delivery of instruction. The first occurred at the time of the Apollo moon landings, when overhead projectors began to supplant the traditional blackboard. The second began with the maturation of personal computing and it continues today, with a bewildering array of multimedia tools and technologies. Moore’s law for the increasing speed of microprocessors and its analog in bandwidth are transforming the economy. Higher education is simply riding this wave of exponential change.

The Net Generation is able to multitask and expects a high degree of engagement with technology (Oblinger and Oblinger, 2005). Technology itself does not guarantee good instruction and some uses are merely “shovelware,” where old content is dressed in new clothes without any enhancement in its function. Academia is still coming to grips with the best ways to teach students using technology (Brown, 2000; Palloff and Pratt, 2001).
As technology advances, we are moving towards a more customizable interface and new teaching techniques should take advantage of this. Some instructors have experimented with wiki-type projects, and the increasingly ubiquitous presence of Web phones may allow instructors to push both general and customized content to each of their students. Voice interpretation technology may soon permit students to interact with a database using text-to-speech software. Instructors should prepare to use the best of the current technology to improve their interactions with students. For example, a very exciting wave of the future is the use of virtual 3D worlds like “Second Life” (see Web references at the end of this writeup) as social learning spaces and places where instructors and students can co-create educational experiences.

Discussion:

The group was concerned about all the various pressures that may keep instructors from trying these new techniques, as well as with the time and support required for some of the techniques (such as portfolio assessment or evaluation using wikis and blogs). Additional pressures come from textbook publishers and reviewers of textbooks not to change the classic course structure, from MCAT and other standardized tests that force instructors to cover a certain set of material, and from tenure processes at major universities that weight research more heavily and so disfavor time invested in teaching.

To combat all of these forces, suggestions included starting modestly with peer-to-peer and other interactive techniques (for example, use TAs to lead small group discussions rather than trying to force a whole class discussion), not leaping straight from traditional to completely peer-to-peer based classes, and finding and using textbooks that help set up a conversation with the students (Examples mentioned included a few books by Addison-Wesley and Dover, as well as experiments in online publishing by various academics). It was recognized that as these techniques are more frequently used, they will come to seem normal and accepted. The instructional culture has not yet reached the tipping point. Last, technology is not always a panacea: Everyone in the room had seen miserable PowerPoint presentations!

The group was also worried about the lower evaluations that may result if an instructor switches teaching techniques. For example, lecture-tutorials often get a response like “I hated this at the start but I learned a lot,” and fair and balanced peer teaching evaluations may be impossible if there are no other pioneering teachers in your department. There was also the awareness that large lecture classes are usually starved of departmental and central support (not just for TAs), and many of the innovative techniques either have startup costs or need more than a single TA to carry them out.

The solutions seemed to be variations on “Don’t underestimate your students.” Some participants reported success in talking about Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Learning Methods Inventory with their students, in order to explain to them why you are doing things the way you are. Session leader Impey pointed out that at the University of Arizona, after the institution implemented clickers in a few classrooms over a wide range of disciplines, it was the students who loved them so much that they forced a more widespread adoption of the clicker technology. Midterm evaluations can be introduced, as long as you explain their role to the students and what you consider the goals for the course. The students will offer more nuanced feedback if they truly think the instructor will change.

The speaker was asked what new-style learning techniques had worked less well. He responded that some small group work doesn’t work well, if the students end up working at widely divergent rates; there ends up being a lot of tension for the instructor and a lot of frustration for the students. Also, portfolio evaluations need to have clear expectations, with a strong framework and explicit evaluation rubrics, or the students can be paralyzed by an activity such as comparing two articles with divergent views.

Final worries involved instructors’ expectations of students in terms of their comfort and familiarity with technology; just because someone looks things up on Wikipedia does not mean that they understand how a wiki works. Similarly, they may not even be familiar with simple Excel analysis. One participant mentioned that all students were required to get Microsoft certification. Technology and coding can also be integrated into courses in such a way as to force students to learn things more deeply. Also, remember that JSTOR and other academic search engines may be frustrating to someone who is used to the ease of Google and Wikipedia, but assignments can be crafted so that students will be forced to go beyond these basic materials. Instructors should not forget to use their library staff.

Recommendations:

• When moving from traditional to more interactive/peer-to-peer techniques, do not assume you have to do it all at once. Start small, and remember that some low-technology techniques can still promote student engagement. There are plenty of resources available; refer to the references and inquire of innovative colleagues what has worked for them. If you are stuck with a “traditionalist” department, try recruiting one or two colleagues, and emphasize the techniques that have been experimentally shown to improve student retention.
• Do not underestimate your students’ ability to understand why you are changing techniques, but always make sure you explain things. Students will be particularly forgiving if they feel you are open to suggestions and have their interests in mind.
• Conversely, do not assume that your students have a preset knowledge of all things technological. Craft your assignments to force them to go deeper into the content or literature and improve their computer literacy beyond a superficial level.

Acknowledgements

C. Impey: I am very grateful to colleagues Tim Slater and Ed Prather for educating me over the years in learner-centered techniques and for doing the research that demonstrates the effectiveness of many of the pedagogical ideas in this presentation. I also thank Adrienne Gauthier and Gina Brissenden for many conversations about technology and instructional design, and Erika Offerdahl and Audra Baleisis for getting my hands dirty with portfolio evaluation. I have learned a lot about inquiry-based instruction from Dick McCray and Doug Duncan at the University of Colorado, Greg Bothun at the University of Oregon, and Eric Mazur at Harvard University. My research in this field has been supported over the past decade by the National Science Foundation under the DUE, DTS, and SGER programs.

References/Resources:

Publications

1. Adams, J.P, Prather, E.E., and Slater, T.F.(2004). Lecture Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy, Pearson Education.
2. Angelo, T.A., and Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers, 2nd Edition, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
3. Bailey, J.M., and Slater, T.F. (2003). A Review of Astronomy Education Research, Astronomy Education Review, Volume 2, pp. 20-45.
4. Bridges, G.S., and Desmond, S., eds. (2000). Teaching and Learning in Large Classes, Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.
5. Brown, D.G., ed. (2000). Interactive Learning: Vignettes from America’s Most Wired Campuses, Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing.
6. Bybee, R.W., ed. (2002). Learning Science and the Science of Learning, Arlington, VA: NSTA Press.
7. Comins, N.F. (2001). Heavenly Errors: Misconceptions About the Real Nature of the Universe, New York: Columbia University Press.
8. Danielson, C., and Abrutyn, L. (1997). An Introduction to Using Portfolios in the Classroom, Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
9. Duncan, D., and Mazur, E. (2005). Clickers in the Classroom: How to Enhance Science Teaching using Classroom Response Systems, Pearson Education.
10. Gabel, D.L., ed. (1994). Handbook of Research on Science Teaching and Learning, New York: Macmillan.
11. Green, P.J. (2003). Peer Instruction in Astronomy, Pearson Education.
12. Hake, R.R. (1998). Interactive Engagement Versus Traditional Methods, American Journal of Physics.
13. Hufnagel, B. (2002). Development of the Astronomy Diagnostic Test, Astronomy Education Review, Volume 1, pp. 47-51.
14. National Research Council (2000). How People Learn, Washington, D.C.: NRC.
15. National Science Teachers Association (2002). Innovative Techniques for Large-Group Instruction, Arlington, VA: NSTA Press.
16. Oblinger, D.G., and Oblinger, J.L., eds. (2005). Educating the Net Generation, Educause.
17. Palloff, R.M., and Pratt, K. (2001). Lessons from the Cyberspace Classroom, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
18. Pompea, S.M. (2000). Great Ideas for Teaching Astronomy, Thomson Learning.
19. Salter, T.F., and Adams, J.P. (2003). Learner-Centered Astronomy Teaching: Strategies for Astro 101, Pearson Education.
20. Tobias, S. (1991). They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different: Stalking the Second Tier, American Journal of Physics, Volume 59, pp. 1155-1157.

Websites

1. Bothun, G., University of Oregon, nearly three dozen Java applets in astronomy and physics, see http://jersey.uoregon.edu/vlab/index.html.
2. Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, this university research project provides access to free concept-mapping tools, see http://cmap.ihmc.us.
3. McCray, R., University of Colorado, astronomy applets with realistic simulations of complex physical situations, see http://stem.colorado.edu/applets.
4. MERLOT, Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, the major national repository of peer-reviewed instructional applications and reusable learning objects, see http://www.merlot.org.
5. Pew Internet and American Life Project, the best way to keep up with the changing landscape of the Internet and its effect on culture, including learning. A series of reports can be found at http://www.pewinternet.org.
6. Second Life, a burgeoning 3D virtual world with over 1,000,000 inhabitants, used by dozens of college classes each year for distance and social learning experiments, see http://www.secondlife.com.
7. Wikipedia, at 1,500,000 articles in English and growing, this free online resource has become the first place students go for information, forcing instructors to address its strengths and its limitations, see http://www.wikipedia.org.