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Education and outreach

Education and outreach

No more lectures any more?

01 Dec 2000

There is nothing more tedious than yet another boring lecture. Derek Raine describes how students at one university are learning their core physics without traditional lectures.

End of the lecture?

Try this introspective experiment. Think about your favourite quiz show and ask yourself how many questions you can remember after the programme ends (never mind the answers). You’ll find that you fall into one of two categories. Where the questions are in a subject you know about, you will probably remember quite a few. Where you do not know the subject, you will probably not recall many. There are two exceptions. If you are a contestant, you will probably remember everything word for word. And if you spot a mistake – like University Challenge quizmaster Jeremy Paxman struggling with quantum theory – you will probably not forget it.

So it is with lectures. In passive mode, students remember only what they already know. Occasionally, a lecturer might engage attention by tripping over his shoelaces or singeing her eyebrows. But lecturing is a spectator sport, and you do not learn to play mainly by watching. The arguments for improving lectures have been rehearsed in these pages on various occasions. Here I argue for a bit of humane culling and some redistribution of resources.

Before we go any further, let us agree on a few facts of life. First, the aim of a physics degree is not to provide students with a knowledge of physics. In the UK, at least, we are not merely training students to regurgitate lectures notes in handily sized examination packages. We regard a knowledge of physics as a means, not an end; we do not even necessarily see physics as a prelude to a career in physics. The purpose of a physics degree is, in essence, to train students to think the non-obvious in an appropriately rigorous manner.

Second, we want our students to be trained for life as independent learners because we know that, in the real world, few people spend any time learning much by means of lectures. So how do we achieve this? By occupying over half of the working week with lectures? I don’t think so.

Lecture problems

The preponderance of the traditional lecture as a way of communicating information is a relatively new phenomenon. Even recent techniques to make lectures more interactive have not changed their basic format. Indeed, study-skills manuals from the early part of the last century advised students going to university that they should initially expect relatively few lectures, because most material can be found in standard textbooks.

Lectures serve a useful social role, but in large doses they lead to a “lecture dependency”. This manifests itself as a tokenism, in which both teacher and taught go through the abstract ceremonial for an hour, inducing the satisfaction of devotions carried out. But it achieves little: the only people who benefit are the small number of students whose progress is almost teacher-independent.

In research it is difficult to be a revolutionary. This is because everyone is doing new things all of the time, if only to stop their competitors getting ahead in the next research-assessment exercise. In teaching, in contrast, it is very easy. Change anything at all and you are threatening the foundations of university life. New approaches to teaching therefore tend to be ghettoized. There is a good reason for this, namely that we lack a strong theoretical underpinning for different modes of teaching. However, in the absence of theory, let us try to create a few facts.

Some 15 years ago my colleagues and at Leicester University decided to abandon lectures for our courses on mathematical techniques for physics students. We found that the intelligent attention span of most students in maths lectures is a number that approaches zero. We decided instead to adopt a planned programme using textual material, exercise workshops and small-group teaching, with just a weekly lecture as an introduction to the current topic. For the last three years we have extended this approach to all of our core physics teaching.

Life without lectures

The basic plot is this. The traditional core “modules” in the first three years – mechanics, electricity and magnetism, etc – are each divided into four fortnightly “units” that follow the same basic pattern throughout the autumn and spring terms. Each consists of:

* an introductory lecture;

* one or more lectures devoted to problem solving after students have familiarized themselves with the material – with some multiple-choice computer-marked questions to encourage them;

* an exercise workshop with students working in groups with help from the staff team;

* a follow-up lecture based on experience in the workshop;

* small group sessions for feedback to students on marked work.

Each module totals about 100 hours and is taught by a team of three staff. The summer term is left free for revision classes.

So what’s new? After all, physics courses everywhere involve the equivalent of examples classes, tutorials and so on. Well, it certainly feels very different – in the same way that the same sum of money feels different if it is a debt or a credit. The material is designed to fit the number of hours of staff-student contact time, which occupy less than a third of the working week, so there is adequate (although not generous) time to go properly round the cycle of learning in each unit.

This cycle involves the acquisition of new knowledge, its assimilation, application and refinement or reflection. The structure of each unit is organized on this principle. As a result, staff and students have manageable tasks with immediate feedback. The responsibility can thus be put legitimately where it belongs: in the hands of the students.

Challenges and solutions

What are the problems of adopting this sort of approach? The news that the physics department has abolished lectures will certainly get round the rest of the university. The first you will know about this is when the pro-vice-chancellor for quality demands to know how your students are supposed to learn physics now that the physics department has given up teaching. You will also need to charm your university timetabling officer to schedule classes at times that are appropriate for the students, not when it is convenient for his or her computer. Finally, for a variety of reasons, the available textbooks are not entirely suitable for the task, so you will have to, as we did, produce some of your own material.

Apart from this we should talk of opportunities, not problems. The structure lets us help students to acquire “study skills”. For example, we run induction workshops where we advise students on how to make notes. It also allows us to integrate core skills such as time management, group work and oral communication into the physics teaching. Above all, however, it has given us the opportunity to incorporate an element of flexible pacing whereby the time that students spend on core material can be extended by up to 40% over two or three years, essentially without additional staff effort. There is no remedial teaching: students proceed at a (quantized) range of speeds through the core material.

But does it work? To help us find out, we employed a consultant from outside the university to carry out an initial evaluation of our new approach. By turning to an external person, we avoided the danger of hearing only what we wanted to. We also hoped that it would prevent us from broadcasting our failings within the university.

In the end, the consultant’s report was largely positive, although it highlighted various scheduling changes and other essential tweaks. And while a few students still find ways of spending a year without apparently learning very much, examination results have generally improved in an interesting way. What we have found is that even the weaker students now attempt the problem sections with some success, and do not just try to regurgitate what they have learned in their textbooks. This is a qualitative leap, not just a lowering of expectations, and it has improved the retention rate of students.

The more interesting evidence is, however, anecdotal. The staunchest defenders of our programme at the staff-student liaison committee meetings are now the third- and fourth-year students. But the story I most like comes from one of our new professors who came to Leicester from a prestigious institution and was impressed by the relative ability of his third-year project students here to get things done.

Do I therefore want the world to adopt our system? No. Whatever you do, do not copy us. What I would suggest, however, is that when constructing a teaching programme you should not think in terms of the solution (lectures) before you have specified the problem. Start from what you want to achieve and draw up a list of the teaching techniques available to achieve it. Then match the means to the ends in the most efficient way. You may be surprised at how much less the traditional lecture figures in the programme. And there is then no reason why those that remain should not all be brilliant.

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