Four years ago, in an effort to improve my teaching in a large enrollment introductory undergraduate physics course at Arizona State University, I sought advice from science education faculty in our Arizona Collaborative. The physics course was to be reformed to model appropriate teaching methods for students studying to become elementary school teachers. I was advised to: Reduce and deepen the course content. Ascertain what I wanted students to learn. Create a test to measure this. Coordinate laboratory experiments with the content discussed in the large class meetings. Change my teaching style from traditional lecture to interactive engagement. Click the discussion link for the complete article.

Devising the achievement test was quite straight forward, as was changing the course design and content. But converting a large class of 100 students from a passive to an active learning environment, while maintaining some semblance of control was both challenging and risky. Fortunately, the ASU Physics Department was poised in 1996 to purchase a new electronic response system called Classtalk for the lecture hall for my class.

That fall semester I took the plunge to utilize Classtalk to convert my life-long teaching style from lecture to interactive, student-centered discussion interspersed with mini-lectures (<10 minutes). Classtalk is both a classroom management and a learning feedback tool, which is easy to learn to use, and very popular with the students. Students when answering the course survey question: "What do you like best about the course?", have responded 80% of the time "Classtalk" for the past four years. Furthermore the pretest/posttest gains for the course over three years indicate Hake gain factors* of two in students' learning of fundamental physics concepts compared with students in traditional lecture classes (control groups). This test, the Physics Concept Survey, incorporates several Force Concept Inventory** items in addition to concepts in electrostatics, circuits, magnetism, light and optics.

This four-year teaching experiment has taught me that significantly greater learning takes place in an active-engagement classroom environment compared with traditional passive, lecture environments, and that even large-enrollment classrooms can be converted successfully to active learning environments when managed with an efficient electronic response system like Classtalk More information about Classtalk and other similar systems can be found at the Better Education website.

** David Hestenes, Malcolm Wells, Greg Swackhamer 1992, "Force Concept Inventory", Phys. Teach., vol. 30, p. 141-158.