Interesting! The authors state their findings in the conclusions:
> After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly sup- ports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instructions of novice to intermediate learners.
I’m disappointed, though, that having a teacher who teaches physics by standing and talking in front of a class appears to be optimal. I wish there would be a more engaging alternative.
I don't know what level of physics you're taking, but the lecture portion is mostly motivational introduction (literally motivating particular types of solutions or insights), but it's not where you learn the details of models or techniques for solution. That is done in some combination of reading the text (before class), previous or concurrent math classes (algebra, calculus, analysis, linear algebra, ODE, complex analysis, PDE, abstract algebra each go really well with particular topics), recitation with a TA (where you can ask for aditional detailed questions), and homework sets (that you'll want to discuss with the TA as well). If you have good labs, you'll actually prove many of the relationships by experiment... and you'll see how hard it is to actually do science (there are so damn many ways to do physical things wrong!).
Like programming the details involve sitting down and cranking out the solutions and having the aha moments by yourself. It's easy to be wowed by a lecture, but if you can't teach it to someone else you don't really understand it.
Nothing teaches like experience :-) as I am sure one of my class mates in GCSE physics who connected up a capacitor the wrong way round and experienced a small explosion :-)
Yeah, it can be frustrating. Try to develop friends with the same interest at multiple levels, and you can fill in some of the gaps yourself. Asking the professor during office hours what other learning opportunities they know of which will help the depth of the course may get you an advocate and a few suggestions. They may be frustrated and burned out too.
The most frustrated I ever saw professors were teaching pre-med, where the students literally only cared about the grades.
The Flipped Classroom[1] is one alternative that has gained some momentum. Basically, watch the lecture on your own before class, so classroom time can be interactive.
This was implemented in some of my classwork when I was attending university - for my language and intro physics classes. Unfortunately, the classes that I took that did this had outlandishly bad commercial implementations of this that we were required to use. Basically, we would watch short video lectures on the topic and then have some homework on the video's topic. Unfortunately, there seems to be no pressure for these companies to make a nice-to-use service, since every website I had to use for this was implemented quite horribly.
One example of how terrible these services are was from my foreign language class. Pearson (fuck Pearson) has a service for that which strictly disallows any international keyboard input, and to write non a-z characters you would have to use their very clunky ui. And for their video player would not allow you to rewind or skip forward in any useful way.
I ended up writing some greasemonkey scripts to re render all of their web content. While doing so, I figured out that they also send all of their answers to homework in the html, so I also wrote a script that could allow you to see the answers - which I ended up using sometimes when questions had multiple correct answers but I couldn't figure out which one the homework system wanted(i.e. different words possible, multiple valid verb conjugations valid, etc.).
It's a shame that online textbook/lecture/homework systems for college coursework tend to be so terribly designed - the most difficult part of coursework shouldn't have to be figuring out how to interface with a clunky web ui. I think there is serious potential for a company to make a well-designed system for coursework if they could market it to colleges correctly - maybe survey students on what they like/don't like about existing products and show to colleges that these systems are seriously lacking. Unfortunately, the big textbook companies seem to have a monopoly on curriculum design, so getting these systems to mesh well with the curriculum could be difficult.
Yeah I should. Problem is that I need to put some finishing touches on it before it would be usable for other people and I don't have access to the system anymore because I graduated so I need to find someone with access to test it out. If anyone has access to myspanishlab by Pearson let me know!
Good point! I understood the article that this was excluded, but you are right, I was mistaken: you can guide upfront and still have students participate (eg., afterwards).
I meant something more than that. Maximally guided instruction doesn't rule out checking for understanding every 10 seconds for instance. It doesn't rule out choral responses. IMO the main benefit of explicit instruction is that it provides a framework for constructing the prompts that check if each atomic concept has been correctly generalised. It's extremely hard to do as a teacher and requires deep subject expertise and very good technical abilities regarding how to communicate.
> After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly sup- ports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instructions of novice to intermediate learners.
I’m disappointed, though, that having a teacher who teaches physics by standing and talking in front of a class appears to be optimal. I wish there would be a more engaging alternative.