On the Hawthorne Effect, well, I'm not sure that this is correct. I'd like to think that TBL keeps students focused not because it is different, but because it provides incentives and rewards for fully engaging the material. In fact, there is something of a literature that suggests that the Hawthorne Effect might not exist, or doesn't play much of a role in education. In "Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html (one of my favorite papers) there is a discussion of its non-existence: We are often asked about the possible contributions of the Hawthorne effect, where any change in conditions is said to result in improved performance. As discussed in citations in the SOM, the original Hawthorne plant data actually show no such effect, nor do experiments in educational settings (17). 17. R. H. Bauernfeind, C. J. Olson, Is the Hawthorne effect in educational experiments a chimera? Phi Delta Kappan 55, 271 (1973). The "SOM" is the "Supporting Online Material" and it is at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2011/05/11/332.6031.862.DC1/Deslauriers.SOM.pdf . It goes into more detail. One of the authors of "Improved Learning," Carl Wieman, is a leading physics education researcher (both a Nobel Laureate and a U.S. Professor of the Year). Also, as an economist, I came across this recent paper: "Was There Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant? An Analysis of the Original Illumination Experiments," Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.3.1.224 . As they put it in their abstract, The data from the first and most influential of these studies, the "Illumination Experiment," were never formally analyzed and were thought to have been destroyed. Our research has uncovered these data. Existing descriptions of supposedly remarkable data patterns prove to be entirely fictional. We do find more subtle manifestations of possible Hawthorne effects. Levitt might be a familiar name -- he's part of the "Freakonomics" team. He's on the faculty at Chicago and some years ago won an award for being the best economist under the age of 35. This is certainly an aside, but as many of us conduct educational research, it seems to be something that we should be aware of. - Bill Brent said (in part): > Thanks for your two cents. I agree; students in a traditional university > usually need the Hawthorne Effect to keep them focused, especially when > they are learning fundamental concepts and being reconditioned for > interdependent processes. -- Bill Goffe Department of Economics SUNY Oswego, 416 Mahar Hall Oswego, NY 13126 315-312-3444(v), 315-312-5444(f) [log in to unmask] http://cook.rfe.org