Should We Lose the Lecture ? TO AN OUTSIDER, the contest at the heart of The results—published in 2011 in Science— Carl Wieman’s 2009 experiment at the were all but a knockout. The postdoc-grad University of British Columbia might have student team saw better attendance, strong looked laughably lopsided. On one side reviews and, most impressively, a wholesale was a charismatic veteran professor with jump in performance. Their class did twice glowing evaluations and long experience. as well as the professor’s on a 12-question On the other, a postdoc and a grad student multiple-choice test at the end of the week. who’d served only as teaching assistants. And it wasn’t just the top or bottom per- Who would do a better job of teaching formers who benefited; the entire distri- beginning engineering majors the finer bution of scores was higher. points of electromagnetic waves? Why “I wasn’t expecting that,” says Wieman, even ask the question? PhD ’77, sitting in his office in the Stan- But the upstarts had rare qualifications ford physics department. “I don’t think in the academic world, where research— anyone was.” not pedagogy—is the usual coin of the It was the extent of the rout that sur- realm. They had trained with Wieman in prised Wieman, not who won. For years, evidence-based instructional methods de- Wieman has called for professors to signed to make students more engaged change how they teach the so-called STEM with their own learning. courses—the science, technology, engi- The experiment took place during the neering and math classes that weed out so 12th week of the semester. While the pro- many students even as society demands fessor followed the familiar format of a ever greater proficiency in those subjects. lecture, the postdoc’s classes unfolded to a The long science lecture may have made far different script, one predicated on col- excellent sense once upon a time, Wieman laboration, practice and feedback. Stu- says. But its continued popularity defies de- dents broke into small groups to puzzle cades of findings from cognitive science, not through problems, with instructors moni- the least of which show our severely limited toring discussions before electronically capacity to retain the volume of information collecting answers to gauge comprehen- regularly thrown from the lectern. sion. Then came a short discussion before Indeed, using the traditional hour-long the cycle repeated with another problem. lecture to teach science, he says with char- An atomic physicist makes the case for active learning. ALEX NABAUM ALEX By Sam Scott 66 MARCH/APRIL 2017 STANFORD 67 Many of the world’s great scientists had been teaching acteristic frankness, is like relying on with scant evidence to support their methods, medieval medicine while boxes of antibi- something they’d never tolerate in their research. otics abound. “It’s the pedagogical equiv- alent of bloodletting,” he says. The Proof A renowned atomic physicist, Wieman— whenever he got stumped in the lab, he’d essentially identical: around 10 percent. who returned in 2013 to Stanford, where ask where he could read how to solve it. “It is really hard to believe the prob- he holds appointments in the physics “The point is that there wasn’t a place lem when you’ve been indoctrinated into department and the Graduate School of to read how to solve it. That’s what phys- a system, until you actually test it your- Education as well as an endowed chair ics research is about,” Wieman says. self,” Wieman says. in engineering—is far from the only And yet after spending a few years voice to call for reform. Nor is the Uni- working in his lab, students usually de- The Scientific Method versity of British Columbia study the veloped into productive scientists. Wie- The repeated findings underscored an only evidence. man began to wonder if it was just a irony. Many of the world’s great scientists Perhaps most exhaustively, a 2014 matter of maturity. Perhaps his students’ had been teaching with scant evidence to meta-analysis led by Scott Freeman, a bi- brains had to emerge from a 17-year support their methods, something they’d ologist at the University of Washington, chrysalis stage before transforming into never tolerate in their research. A small analyzed 225 studies and found that stu- physicist butterflies. percentage of students might flourish, dents in STEM lecture courses were 1.5 But as a committed experimentalist, often because of motivation to work on times more likely to fail than those in Wieman wasn’t content with conjec- their own. But an alarming number were courses using “active learning,” as the ture. He began immersing himself in ex- getting only the most superficial under- teaching style featured in Wieman’s ex- isting education research and carrying standing, at a steep cost not just to their periment is broadly called. out his own, tapping into a growing body own education but to the general scientific But perhaps no one has so doggedly of work exposing the weaknesses of sci- literacy of society. pursued reform from so many angles as ence education. Ultimately, Wieman would come to Wieman. He has founded institutes at the In a watershed paper, David Hestenes, understand that his grad students evolved University of Colorado and in British Co- a professor at Arizona State University, into scientists in his lab not out of maturi- lumbia to research and to train instruc- described a simple test given to thousands ty but because they were practicing sci- tors; created interactive online physics of undergrads that revealed most were ence and reckoning with its concepts as simulations used around the world; leaving their introductory physics courses they never had before, creating their own pushed the matter in Washington, D.C., almost as ignorant of the fundamentals of understanding rather than parroting where he was associate director for sci- the subject as when they arrived. Many what they’d learned. And that was the ence in the White House Office of Science made similar discoveries using their own power of active learning. With homework, and Technology Policy; and generally students, including Eric Mazur, a physi- students could learn the basics of new evangelized to—occasionally—great effect. “Suddenly, it began to look feasible,” ated the world’s first Bose-Einstein con- TEAMWORK: Wieman engages with graduate cist at Harvard who would become another material on their own. With practice and Peter LePage, former dean of Cor- says LePage, MS ’76, PhD ’78. “My reali- densate—an elusive but long-anticipated students in one of his education classes. leading voice for change. feedback in class, they would wrestle with nell’s College of Arts and Sciences, cred- zation was, ‘I am going to be a negligent form of new matter achieved by bringing In Wieman’s own research, he and a and come to master it. its Wieman—his housemate during their dean if I don’t find some way to act on atoms within a few hundred billionths of a zero”—he’ll finish a major paper at night, colleague would present “a nonobvious “It’s just not how the brain learns,” he Stanford days—for providing not just this information.’ ” degree of absolute zero. then wake early to work on a book in the fact” in a lecture along with an illustra- says. “It does not learn to do these things the “why” but the “how” for Cornell’s People often assume it was only then morning. And even while he was hot on tion, then quiz the students a short while by watching someone write on a chalk- active learning initiative, launched in The Motivation that he landed on education research, a the trail of physics glory, Wieman toggled later. In one instance, they brought in a board or by listening to them talk.” 2012. By developing ways to train teach- It helps in all these endeavors that Wie- young laureate in search of a second act. between blasting atoms and investigating violin to demonstrate that its strings do Professors retain a central role, but ing fellows to help professors, Wieman man’s own scientific bona fides are -be But the prize, he says, meant he could get his new area of interest, one originally in- not move enough air to create the instru- Wieman sees them more like athletic showed him how change could be imple- yond reproach. A Nobel Prize does that. people to finally listen to what he had to spired by a nagging mystery: Why were ment’s sound. Rather, the strings make coaches, putting students through stren- mented even in classes with hundreds Wieman got the call from Stockholm in say on the topic. (He donated the prize his graduate students so unprepared? the back of the violin move, which in turn uous, targeted practice while giving im- of students and maxed-out faculty. 2001, six years after he and a partner cre- money to physics education at the Uni- On paper many were all-stars, he says, produces the sound we hear. Fifteen mediate feedback and direction based on versity of Colorado, where he was a pro- with gilded grades and glowing endorse- minutes later, only 10 percent of the class performance. By confronting the prob- fessor from 1984 to 2013.) ments. But so many of them arrived at could recall this fact on a multiple- lems first, the audience is more invested— his lab unable to think like physicists. He choice question. and prepared—to hear what the professor WIEMAN, SAYS DAN SCHWARTZ, the dean of recalls one particular student who came Concerned it was just a reflection on has to say.