active engagement

Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper appeared in Science, which is unusual enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging treatment. OK, what's this paper about? Well, with the exceptional originality that physicists bring to all things, the title pretty much says it all. They demonstrated that a different style of teaching applied to a large…