I've been reading a bit about learning of late and it got me thinking about the underpinnings of why TBL seems to work so well. In "Applying New Research to Improve Science Education," http://www.aapt.org/Conferences/newfaculty/upload/Wieman-feature-Issues-in-S-T-9-12.pdf Carl Wieman looks at the cognitive science literature and finds that "deliberate practice" is a key to acquiring expert-like abilities. In "Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class," Science, May 13, 2011, vol. 332 no. 6031 pp. 862-864, http://www.iclicker.com/uploadedFiles/Content/User_Community/Custom_Marketing/Weiman_2011.pdf Wieman and his co-authors compare a lecture-taught class with one that employs a lot of deliberate practice and they find that the latter leads to much more learning. Wieman is a huge name in science education: Nobel Laureate, U.S. Professor of the Year (given for teaching), and former deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education. As an aside, it would be great if TBL was used in papers like the last one. The work on deliberate practice mainly comes from the work of K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in papers like "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" (Google Scholar reports more than 3,000 cites to this paper alone). This research became popularized by the "10,000 Hour Rule" in Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers." Wieman describes deliberate practice as This involves the learner solving a set of tasks or problems that are challenging but doable and that involve explicitly practicing the appropriate expert thinking and performance. The tasks must be sufficiently difficult to require intense effort by the learner if progress is to be made, and hence must be adjusted to the current state of expertise of the learner. Deliberate practice also includes internal reflection by the learner and feedback from the teacher/coach, during which the achievement of the learner is compared with a standard, and there is an analysis of how to make further progress. Of course, this sounds pretty similar to a good application exercise, with the possible exception of internal reflection -- but it wouldn't be that hard to add that I would think. Wieman goes on to describe how students must be encouraged to devote time to deliberate practice and I'd guess that the social aspects of TBL are an aid here -- one comes to class prepared so as not to let others down and to not look like a free-rider. Students also contribute to the team in application exercises as a social endeavor. Another bit of cognitive science that might apply to TBL is a concept called a "time for telling." Two references are "A Time for Telling," Schwartz and Bransford, Cognition and Instruction, Vol. 16, No. 4, 1998, and 'Preparing Students to Learn from Lecture: Creating a “Time for Telling” (Learning About Teaching Physics podcast)' http://www.ptec.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=12192 . Broadly speaking, it is about setting up a situation where students are receptive to lecture. While these cites look at situations a bit different from TBL, in my classrooms I find that students seem quite receptive to hearing about the reasoning behind the correct answer in a RAT or application exercise after they've done it. Maybe these ideas will be useful for thinking about why TBL works so well. Also, as above, it would be nice to have more studies about the effectiveness of TBL. - Bill -- Bill Goffe Senior Lecturer Department of Economics Penn State University 304 Kern Building University Park, PA 16802 814-867-3299 [log in to unmask] http://cook.rfe.org