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Use of interactive lecture demonstrations: A ten year study
written by
Manjula Devi Sharma, Ian D. Johnston, Helen Johnston, Kevin Varvell, Gordon Robertson, Andrew Hopkins, Chris Stewart, Ian Cooper, and Ronald K. Thornton
The widely held constructivist view of learning advocates student engagement via interactivity. Within the physics education research community, several specific interactive strategies have been developed to enhance conceptual understanding. One such strategy, the Interactive Lecture Demonstration (ILD) is designed for large lecture classes and, if measured using specific conceptual surveys, is purported to provide learning gains of up to 80%. This paper reports on learning gains for two different Projects over ten years. In Project 1, the ILDs were implemented from 1999 to 2001 with students who had successfully completed senior high school physics. The learning gains for students not exposed to the ILDs were in the range 13% to 16% while those for students exposed to the ILDs was 31% to 50%. In Project 2, the ILDs were implemented from 2007 to 2009 with students who had not studied senior high school physics. Since the use of ILDs in Project 1 had produced positive results, ethical considerations dictated that all students be exposed to ILDs. The learning gains were from 28% to 42%. On the one hand it is pleasing to note that there is an increase in learning gains, yet on the other, we note that the gains are nowhere near the claimed 80%. This paper also reports on teacher experiences of using the ILDs, in Project 2.
Released under a This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. The article citation is: M. Sharma, I. Johnston, H. Johnston, K. Varvell, G. Robertson, A. Hopkins, C. Stewart, I. Cooper, and R. Thornton, Use of interactive lecture demonstrations: A ten year study, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 6 (2), 020119 (2010), 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.6.020119.
Published October 8, 2010
Last Modified May 20, 2012
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