A controlled comparison of teaching methods in first-year university physics

This study presents a rigorous comparison between two teaching methods currently used in the first year of university-level physics programmes. Two groups of year 12 and 13 school students, aged between 16 and 18 years old, were given a short lecture course on elementary Newtonian Mechanics, one group attending more traditional passive-student lectures and the other attending an interactive active-student programme. The two groups were constructed to be as similar as possible in terms of relevant factors and were pre-tested with the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and post-tested with the FCI and the Mechanics Baseline Test (MBT). Several measures of learning based on pre-test/post-test score change were employed to assess the relative effectiveness of the two lecture styles. The principal result of this study was the early onset of greater learning gains among students in the active-student programme compared to students in the passive-student programme. The particular choice of learning gain metric affected the interpretation of our results. We resolved this issue using a generalization of the normalized learning gain. Using this measure we also found improvement in problem-solving skill among females in the active-student group, but not in the passive-student group. On the other hand, males showed improvement in problem-solving skill in the passive-student group but not the active-student group.