Carl Wieman: why a Nobel physicist moved beyond the lecture

In 2001, Carl Wieman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Eric Cornell and Wolfgang Ketterle for creating the first Bose–Einstein condensate, a new state of matter. He then turned to a different puzzle: why do so many students sit through physics lectures and leave without learning to think like physicists?

Wieman spent the next two decades treating teaching as a scientific problem. He started PhET Interactive Simulations at the University of Colorado Boulder, led science education programmes in Colorado and at the University of British Columbia, and now works at Stanford. His conclusion, backed by data, is that students learn science by doing it, not by watching an expert do it.

One week, two ways to teach

In a study published in Science in 2011, Wieman and his colleagues Louis Deslauriers and Ellen Schelew compared two large sections of the same introductory physics course at the University of British Columbia, with 267 and 271 students.

For one week, one section was taught by an experienced and highly rated lecturer. The other was taught by a trained but inexperienced instructor using methods drawn from research on learning: short pre-class reading, then class time spent answering questions, discussing them in small groups and getting immediate feedback.

The research-based section showed higher attendance, higher engagement and more than twice the learning on a test of the material.

It is not just one study

A 2014 analysis of 225 studies in science, engineering and mathematics courses found the same pattern at scale. With active learning, average exam scores rose by about 6%. Students in traditional lecture classes were 1.5 times more likely to fail.

Why it does not feel like it is working

There is a catch, and Wieman's group measured it too. In a 2019 study, students in active classes learned more than students in polished lectures, but they felt they had learned less.

Working through a problem feels harder than watching someone else solve it smoothly, and students read that effort as confusion. A great lecture can feel like learning without producing much of it.

What this means for you as a student

You cannot always choose how you are taught, but you can choose how you take part. Here is how to bring active learning into any class or coaching session:

• Before class, read the topic or try one problem, so the lecture answers questions you already have.

• During class, predict the answer before the teacher reveals it, even silently. Being wrong and then corrected is how it sticks.

• After class, close your notes and solve a problem from scratch. If you get stuck, that shows you exactly what to revise.

• Explain it to a friend. If you cannot explain why, you have memorised it, not understood it.

• Treat struggle as a good sign. Effort is what learning feels like.

A good place to start is PhET, the free simulation project Wieman founded. Pick one simulation for a topic you find hard and play with it before reading the theory.

Fermi is built around the same principle. The Fermi Simulation Lab has interactive simulations for the ideas that are easier to see than to read, and during a lesson Fermi's AI tutor can draw the figure, run the simulation and check your understanding as it goes, so you are working through the idea rather than watching it.