Some TeamLearning subscribers may be interested in a recent post "At
M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard - REDUX
#2" [Hake (2009)]. The abstract reads:
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ABSTRACT: Sara Rimer's New York Times report "At M.I.T., Large
Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard" concerning John
Belcher's "Technology-Enabled Active Learning" (TEAL) program has
received widespread attention (about 30,000 hits on Google).
Recently, guest blogger Diana Senechal (2009) in her provocative post
"What's with those clickers in physics class?" criticized TEAL on the
basis of (a) comments published in the NYT by a few disaffected MIT
students, and (b) her own preference for lectures over what she
perceived as "group buzz, multiple-choice problems, and clickers."
Similarly, Margaret Harris' PhysicsWorld criticism of TEAL relies
primarily on the comments of a few disgruntled MIT students.
But neither student comments nor one's own preferences provide valid
gauges of the *cognitive* (as opposed to the *affective*) impact of a
course on the *average* student.
As repeatedly emphasized, the cognitive impact of a course is best
gauged by pre-to-postest normalized gains on valid and consistently
reliable tests developed through arduous quantitative and qualitative
research by disciplinary experts.
Although this idea is gradually gaining traction in undergraduate
astronomy, biology, chemistry, economics, geoscience, engineering,
calculus, and physics, most of academia has turned a deaf ear. But
similar ideas, independently suggested by physics Nobelist Carl
Wieman (2005) may attract more attention.
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To access the complete 27 kB post please click on <http://tinyurl.com/kqfpxy>.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands.
<[log in to unmask]>
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake/
http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi/
http://HakesEdStuff.blogspot.com/
REFERENCES
Hake, R.R. 2009. "At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the
Blackboard - REDUX #2," online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at
<http://tinyurl.com/kqfpxy>. Post of 13 Sep 2009 08:31:05-0700 to
AERA-L, Net-Gold, and PhysLrnR. In addition, the abstract was
transmitted to various discussion lists.
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