"When we measure how little people learn from an actual lecture it's just really small," says Professor Carl Wieman. He argues active-learning methods produce deeper understanding.
Bloodletting to keep the "humors" in balance was a leading medical treatment from ancient Greece to the late 19th century. That's hard to believe now in the age of robot-assisted surgery, but "doctors" trusted lancets and leeches for centuries.
To Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the college lecture is the educational equivalent of bloodletting, one long overdue for revision.
"It's a very good analogy," the Stanford professor says. "You let some blood out and go away and they get well. Was it bloodletting that did it, or something else?"
The large college lecture — the cornerstone of undergraduate education in America and much of the world today — is similar, Wieman argues. "You give people lectures and [some students] go away and learn the stuff. But it wasn't that they learned it from lecture, they learned it from homework, from assignments. When we measure how little people learn from an actual lecture it's just really small."
For Wieman, the fact that most colleges and universities don't even bother to systemically measure teaching quality is the bigger problem festering in higher education. Administrators, he argues, are instead obsessed with publishing and research funding, which remain the bedrock of tenure and promotion.
"The quality of teaching is not something that university administrators are rewarded for, and correspondingly know or care about," Wieman says. "If they improved the quality of teaching by 100 percent and in the process reduced the amount of research funding and publications by 1 percent, they would be penalized, since the latter is carefully measured and compared across institutions, while the former is never measured."
Wieman won the Nobel Prize for physics 2001 for creating what's called Bose-Einstein condensation in a dilute gas, or, as he puts it with a grin, "getting atoms really really cold and they do weird quantum things!"
As a scientist and experimentalist, data drives Wieman's work as a professor in both Stanford's physics department and in its graduate school of education. For years, even before arriving in California, he'd measure the effectiveness of lectures versus other evidence-based methods of teaching.
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