Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool

By Emily Hanford from NPR

The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.

“Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.

But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.

When Eric Mazur began teaching physics at Harvard, he started out teaching the same way he had been taught.

“I sort of projected my own experience, my own vision of learning and teaching — which is what my instructors had done to me. So I lectured,” he says.

He loved to lecture. Mazur’s students apparently loved it, too. They gave him great evaluations and his classes were full.

“For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job,” he says.

But then in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes got the idea for the series when a colleague came to him with a problem. The students in his introductory physics courses were not doing well: Semester after semester, the class average never got above about 40 percent.

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