In 2008 a survey of 722 US physics lecturers found that many of them had knowledge about research-based alternatives to lecturing, were interested in trying them out, but about a third of the lecturers had already tried an alternative and stopped using it for various reasons. In a recently published study in the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research, a similar questionnaire was administered to 1176 physics lecturers. The results show an increase in knowledge about research-based teaching strategies, along with more self-reported use, whilst the amount of “discontinuation” is now relatively low.

The study was carried out with the deliberate intention of comparing a new data set to the 2008 study. The survey covered five main topics: Course context and details; Instructional practice; Awareness and usage of active learning instruction; Perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes related to students, learning, and departmental context; and Personal demographics and experience. The survey was distributed by the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center collecting 1176 responses from physics instructors at 565 different institutions across the US. The authors point out that demographically the two studies are very similar and are therefore comparable.

The main findings are that:

• Knowledge and use of research-based practices has increased between 2008 and 2019
• The proportion of time instructors report lecturing decreased between 2008 and 2019, but is still high
• Instructors still utilize research-based practices to supplement lectures rather than strategies that focus the course on active learning

In conclusion, the authors point out that although there is not much research about the ideal percentage of time spent in active learning, the little research available at this point suggests that instructors who spend at least 66 percent of class time in active learning achieve the best results. In the study, only 36 percent of physics instructors who answered the questionnaire report using active learning for 66 percent or more of class time. The authors therefore conclude that physics lecturers are still lecturing too much.

Comment: When it comes to teaching university physics there is actually a lot of research-based evidence about what works, what doesn’t and why. It might surprise you that the source of this knowledge can be directly linked to the former Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. This one event signalled the start of the space race. In order to catch up with the Soviets, the US needed physicists—lots of them. Consequently, large amounts of money were provided for university physics education and this in turn led to research into how best to teach physics. Today, over 80 university physics departments in the US contain physics education research groups and similar groups have been started in physics departments internationally. With this much research going on over such an extended period of time, it is not surprising that we now know quite a lot about how to teach physics!

In terms of the article that is the focus of this newsletter, one of the major milestones for the active learning approach to teaching physics was a meta-analysis published by Richard Hake in 1998, where he compared the results of over 6000 physics students on a well-known standardized test. Using statistical analysis, he could definitively demonstrate that active learning was superior to traditional approaches to teaching. This convinced many physicists—who in general had been fairly sceptical to innovative approaches to teaching—to look into these alternatives to lecturing.

More recently, Nobel laureate Carl Weiman and his collaborators writing in the journal Science, showed how an inexperienced junior lecturer, trained in active learning can achieve much better results than a highly experienced physics instructor who uses traditional lecture-based teaching (Deslauriers et al. 2011).

Over the years, the physics education research community has investigated the teaching and learning of a wide range of topics in physics. The American Association of Physics Teachers has collected and catalogued these decades of physics education research and made them freely available at per-central.org. Unfortunately, as shown in this new study, it takes time for lecturers to change their teaching habits—even when active learning has been consistently shown to give statistically significant increases in learning.

In fact, it may be that physics instructors are not really changing their practice to any great extent. In the ten years between the studies, the demographics of those surveyed will also have changed with new instructors coming in. Students who may have experienced some form of active learning in their own education are now becoming lecturers themselves.

Text: John Airey, Department of Teaching and Learning

The study
Dancy, M., Henderson, C., Apkarian, N., Johnson, E., Stains, M., Raker, J. R., & Lau, A. (2024). Physics instructors’ knowledge and use of active learning has increased over the last decade but most still lecture too much. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 20(1), 010119.

Keywords: Research-based instruction, active learning, lecturing, undergraduate physics