The Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) Project

How do you keep a classroom of today's undergraduates actively learning? Can students practice communication and teamwork skills in larger classes? How do you boost the performance of underrepresented groups? The Student-Centered Active Learning Environment for Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) Project is an integrated lecture/ "lab" approach that has addressed these concerns. GSU's new Studio Physics classroom for 54 students is designed after our SCALE-UP model.

In a SCALE-UP (or Studio) classroom, students sit in three teams of three at round tables. The environment is dramatically different than a conventional lecture hall, fostering much greater interactivity among students, and also between the students and the instructor (and/or teaching assistants). Materials developed by the SCALE-UP project are now in use by more than 1/3 of all science, math, and engineering majors nationwide. Physics, chemistry, math, biology, engineering, business, nursing, and even literature classes are being taught this way, at more than 50 institutions nationwide.

Educational research indicates that students should collaborate on interesting tasks and be deeply involved with the material they are studying. We promote active learning in a redesigned classroom for 100 students or more. (Of course, smaller classes can also benefit.) - Class time is spent primarily on "tangibles" and "ponderables" hands-on activities, simulations, and interesting questions. There are also hypothesis-driven labs. Instructors circulate among the round tables and engage in Socratic dialogues. The setting looks like a banquet hall, with lively interactions nearly all the time.

Hundreds of hours of classroom video and audio recordings, transcripts of numerous interviews and focus groups, data from conceptual learning assessments (using widely-recognized instruments in a pretest/posttest protocol), and collected portfolios of student work are part of our rigorous assessment effort. We have data comparing 16,000+ students. Our findings can be summarized as the following:

Ability to solve problems is improved
Conceptual understanding is increased
Attitudes are improved
Failure rates are drastically reduced, especially for women and minorities
Performance in later courses is enhanced

In this talk I will discuss the classroom environment, describe (or enact, if time permits) some of the activities, and review the findings of studies of learning in various SCALE-UP settings.  I will also compare costs of this integrated lecture/lab approach to science courses with the costs of traditional auditorium/stadium structure for lectures plus separate facilities for labs.