On human interaction in teaching (physics in college in fact), check out this 2.5 minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg . A great study on how this leads to more learning than lecturing is this article from the journal Science: "Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html . Briefly, they compared 2 novice physics instructors who were trained in cognitive science (and thus how people learn) and who taught with a variety of non-lecture methods to an experienced, well-regarded lecturer. The students of the novice instructors had two standard deviations more learning. Note that the third author is a Nobel Laureate, U.S. Professor of the Year (given for teaching), and currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education. For more on these methods, see "Don't Lecture Me," http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/ . This work deserves to be more widely known.
One way to look at what you describe is that during the depths of the crisis banks lost about 1/2 their capital. Without capital, they fail and take us with them (as happened during the Great Depression). One quick way to recapitalize them is to do exactly what you decry. Does it seem unfair? Yes. But, it also aids the economy by keeping the financial system afloat.
In a better world we'd have smaller institutions that individually don't pose as much risk. Not so easy to do that today given the funding that Wall Street provides to Washington.
The 7.7 trillion comes about because many of the loans were very short term and rolled over repeatedly. If a bank borrowed $100M for one week and then renewed it for the 2nd week in this database it comes up as $200M in loans. This is NOT where the large debts that western nations are dealing with came about. This lending has just about dried up; see http://www.economicnoise.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/fed-balance-sheet-april-2011.png . Gray denotes lending to financial institutions.
Rather, it is a "central bank" and every country has one. Ours was established by the Federal Reserve Act of nearly a century ago and periodically their mandate has changed with the passage of new laws. Also, its leaders are nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. While hardly perfect, it has helped reduce instability in the economy. Check out http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html and you'll see that compared to the period before the establishment of the Fed, the last century has been much more stable. While they can indeed make a profit, it goes to the U.S. Treasury.
On the Fed's relative independence being a good or bad thing, the weight of the professional research literature suggests that countries with independent central banks have lower inflation. The reason is pretty obvious -- increases in the money supply is a pretty tempting thing for politicians to do.
It isn't widely recognized how severe the crisis was in the Fall of 2008 -- at one point U.S. banks had lost half their capital and interbank lending, a lifeblood to the system, was drying up. The U.S. financial system all but collapsed and if not for the intervention of the Fed it would have certainly dragged the economy down with it. Many claim that we should have let banks fail -- I understand the sentiment, but we tried that once -- it's widely known as the Great Depression. Back then 1/3 of U.S. banks shut their doors and this was in the days before deposit insurance.
Yes, the rescue was ugly and there is a lot to the point about socializing risk. But, back in 2008 that wasn't at the front of the Fed's mind. I'd be in favor of reducing the size of institutions so that we no longer have "systematically important institutions," but that doesn't carry much weight these days given Wall Street's influence in Washington.
Not that appeals to authority carry much weight, but among professional economists (I'm one) appeals to eliminate the Fed are seen as nutty. Also, much of this is covered in various college economics courses.
The current Scientific American has an interesting article on the path that manned exploration out of the Earth-Moon system might take. It employs aspects of the unmanned program to cut cots and to have a more flexible program. One interesting aspect is that the main spacecraft is parked in high earth orbit and human crews fly to it in a small craft. Once on the main craft, it does a swing by the Earth to get a speed boost. Its main engine is electric-power (off of solar arrays). While only part of the Scientific American article ("This Way to Mars," 12/2011 issue) is free, they do kindly provide links to its references at the bottom of the page. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=this-way-to-mars.
Apparently, you need about 100 tons in low Earth orbit for such a craft. That would be two launches of SpaceX's proposed Falcon Heavy. It seems way more likely to fly than NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS).
Projects like Modeling, http://modeling.asu.edu/ , are designed to ferret out misconceptions. They're typically deeply entrenched and you really have to address them head-on in really thoughtful ways. When you do, deep learning may then occur. Watching videos, not designed to ferret our misconceptions, isn't nearly as likely to do this.
This is totally anecdotal, but I've heard of reports of modeling instructors getting pressured to use Khan's videos. The former has sound pedagogy and tons of research behind it demonstrating improved student understanding and the latter has neither. Sigh.
To really assess you learning (if you're doing Newtonian Mechanics), see if your instructors will give you the "Force Concept Inventory." It's a standard in physics education research. For more on it, see http://modeling.asu.edu/r%26e/fci.pdf . As they put it, "(1) commonsense beliefs about motion and force are incompatible with Newtonian concepts in most respects, (2) conventional physics instruction produces little change in these beliefs, and (3) this result is independent of the instructor and the mode of instruction." At last count, Google Scholar reports 1,400 citations to this paper. It's that important. With Khan's videos as taped lectures, this research implies that they don't produce much deep learning.
At least in physics there is a HUGE body of evidence that telling is basically not teaching, be it lectures or videos. That is, one must confront student misconceptions and more generally understand how people learn. We don't learn deeply by watching. Seriously, what elite athlete learned by watching and listening?
"Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (the author is both a Nobel Laureate and a U.S. University Professor of the Year; he's currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education)
It is a sad commentary that methods that have rigorously been shown to work, like http://modeling.asu.edu/ , could really use more funding when Khan gets such funding on just the publicity.
The site Software Carpentry aims to teach scientists and engineers key programming tools and approaches to write better code. There are many, many resources to help non-programmers write better code. The fellow who runs it, Greg Wilson, has done yeoman work in this regard. I was so impressed that I invited him to an academic conference and we were really pleased.
It is great to see this interest in learning, but too bad that methods that careful research have shown to increase learning haven't received the same publicity (my understanding is that research based on the Khan Academy has yet to come out). I have in mind: Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class," Deslauriers, Schelew, and Wieman, Science, May, 2011 (a postdoc and grad student, using research based methods, get 2 standard deviations more learning in a physics class than an experienced prof with high student evaluations who lectured). . Note that Wieman is a both a Nobel Laureate and a U.S. Professor of the Year (given for teaching). Another article is Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses, which again shows a 2-standard deviation increase in learning by not lecturing.
There is even evidence that watching Khan videos leads to a false sense of learning. See Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos" It basically shows that while students think they're learning a lot by watching videos, their actual learning is minimal.
Practices and conclusions based on objective data rather than—as is frequently the case in education—anecdote or tradition. This includes using the results of prior research, such as work on how people learn.
Disseminating results in a scholarly manner and copying and building upon what works. Too often in education, particularly at the postsecondary level, everything is reinvented, often in a highly flawed form, every time a different instructor teaches a course. (I call this problem “reinventing the square wheel.”)
Fully utilizing modern technology. Just as we are always looking for ways to use technology to advance scientific research, we need to do the same in education.
At best, Khan Academy only does the third of these.
We certainly had booms and busts well before we had a central bank (i.e. the Fed, which was established in 1913). As time has gone by, they've generally gotten better at central banking; the period from 1982 to 2007 is often called the "Great Moderation" for this quarter century of stable growth: two mild recessions and stable and low inflation; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Moderation . Also, take a look at the real GDP data from http://measuringworth.com/usgdp/ (put together by economic historians) and note the falling volatility over the last century (easiest seen in the log view). Finally check out http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html (from the people who officially date recessions) and note the increasing length of expansions and shorter recessions.
They weren't paid, it was loaned, and all but some $30 billion came back. Also, we once let the financial system collapse and we didn't do a thing to stop it -- today it's widely known as the Great Depression. Back then 1/3 of banks in the U.S. shut their doors in the days before the FDIC. The details were different this time, but the impact could have been the same as bank capital went from $1.3 trillion to $.3 trillion in a few months. We complain that Washington doesn't "do the right thing," but in this case they did (Congress, Bush, and Obama), and now they catch hell for it. Finally, there's a reason that Bernanke was Time's Person of the Year.
If you teach physics, I hope that you've looked at what Physics Education Research (PER) has done. These physicists have shown
how to teach this difficult subject much more effectively.
One nice starting point is "Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf.The author, Carl Wieman, has a Nobel Prize, was Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities) and is currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President (for science education). If you're into video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI is quite good (the lecturer, Eric Mazur, is "only" a full professor at Harvard; of course there are many pubs too). Finally, the general portal to PER is http://www.compadre.org/per/ .
However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?
Yes and no.
It was an intro physics class, but at Harvard (with many pre-meds in the course; not sure if majors or not). Certainly the students were motivated and had had physics in high school. The point is that students could do calculations, but they didn't understand, in a fundamental way, Newton's Laws (kinda the point of an intro physics class). If you really don't understand them, then you haven't learned what that course is all about. Here's my favorite quote when one of the students was given the assessment with that question, that asked about everyday phenomena, like colliding cars and trucks: "How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things?" (again, a Harvard student taught by someone who was regarded an excellent lecturer). When the results came back on the assessment, sure enough, these students largely didn't understand the fundamentals.
In http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI and http://www.compadre.org/per/items/detail.cfm?ID=4990 Mazur (sorry, both are quite long) describes the same thing with circuits -- students could do the math, but couldn't describe what would happen if a light bulb was pulled out of a simple one. In short, they didn't fundamentally understand the concepts. There is a large literature in physics education research that on a fundamental level students don't understand the key concepts. One leading paper on this (the leading one?) is http://modeling.asu.edu/r&e/fci.pdf (some 1,000 cites from the scholarly literature) . It makes for sobering reading.
Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker.
Rather than "dumb," this literature finds that such techniques leads to students who (i) can do calculations as well as those in a traditional class and (ii) have a better fundamental understanding. This really isn't too surprising as they're actually doing physics with a lot of frequent feedback from their clicker responses and discussions with each other to carefully crafted questions designed to help ferret out their common misconceptions. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI (quite short) where students are much more engaged than in the typical lecture. Part of that is students committing anonymously to a question (via clickers). With no questions, there is a strong temptation for students to say, "Yeah, I understand that." Many times, in fact, they don't.
Yes, the clicker is just a means to an end (shouldn't all technology in teaching be that?) -- getting students to commit anonymously to an answer. As Mazur says in http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf , you can get the same basic results with cards that students hold up and where they can't easily see each other's cards. As you say, and I'm sure that Mazur agrees, key is the discussion with other students and with Mazur.
One more direct role for technology here is that students at first do on-line homeworks that are used to guide the selection of ques
As a college professor (economics), I take pretty seriously the work of physicists like Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize, 2001, U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities), 2004; and currently associate science adviser to the President) and Eric Mazur (Harvard). They and many other serious physicists have carefully studied how students learn in their field. They've found that things like clickers, correctly used, and simulations can indeed aid learning in deep ways. Here's some links to summaries of their work:
http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf (Mazur -- short, in the journal Science)
http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (Wieman -- longer)
Here's a key part of the primary literature; it has more than 1,000 cites:
http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf (the most frequent method of "interactive engagement" is clickers).
Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.
For evidence that isn't anecdotal and dates from 1982, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7618722 . This got a lot of play when it came out. I also teach at college and this research certainly jives with my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
For a more general set of suggestions on study skills based on cognitive science, see "How to Get the Most Out of Studying Video Series". This is by Steve Chew, who was recently named a "U.S. Professor of the Year" for his teaching ability. For something printed, but not as detailed, see his "Improving Classroom Performance by Challenging Student Misconceptions About Learning". I recommend the video to all my students (I'm a college economics professor).
On human interaction in teaching (physics in college in fact), check out this 2.5 minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBYrKPoVFwg . A great study on how this leads to more learning than lecturing is this article from the journal Science: "Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html . Briefly, they compared 2 novice physics instructors who were trained in cognitive science (and thus how people learn) and who taught with a variety of non-lecture methods to an experienced, well-regarded lecturer. The students of the novice instructors had two standard deviations more learning. Note that the third author is a Nobel Laureate, U.S. Professor of the Year (given for teaching), and currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education. For more on these methods, see "Don't Lecture Me," http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/tomorrows-college/lectures/ . This work deserves to be more widely known.
One way to look at what you describe is that during the depths of the crisis banks lost about 1/2 their capital. Without capital, they fail and take us with them (as happened during the Great Depression). One quick way to recapitalize them is to do exactly what you decry. Does it seem unfair? Yes. But, it also aids the economy by keeping the financial system afloat.
In a better world we'd have smaller institutions that individually don't pose as much risk. Not so easy to do that today given the funding that Wall Street provides to Washington.
The 7.7 trillion comes about because many of the loans were very short term and rolled over repeatedly. If a bank borrowed $100M for one week and then renewed it for the 2nd week in this database it comes up as $200M in loans. This is NOT where the large debts that western nations are dealing with came about. This lending has just about dried up; see http://www.economicnoise.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/fed-balance-sheet-april-2011.png . Gray denotes lending to financial institutions.
Rather, it is a "central bank" and every country has one. Ours was established by the Federal Reserve Act of nearly a century ago and periodically their mandate has changed with the passage of new laws. Also, its leaders are nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. While hardly perfect, it has helped reduce instability in the economy. Check out http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html and you'll see that compared to the period before the establishment of the Fed, the last century has been much more stable. While they can indeed make a profit, it goes to the U.S. Treasury.
On the Fed's relative independence being a good or bad thing, the weight of the professional research literature suggests that countries with independent central banks have lower inflation. The reason is pretty obvious -- increases in the money supply is a pretty tempting thing for politicians to do.
It isn't widely recognized how severe the crisis was in the Fall of 2008 -- at one point U.S. banks had lost half their capital and interbank lending, a lifeblood to the system, was drying up. The U.S. financial system all but collapsed and if not for the intervention of the Fed it would have certainly dragged the economy down with it. Many claim that we should have let banks fail -- I understand the sentiment, but we tried that once -- it's widely known as the Great Depression. Back then 1/3 of U.S. banks shut their doors and this was in the days before deposit insurance.
Yes, the rescue was ugly and there is a lot to the point about socializing risk. But, back in 2008 that wasn't at the front of the Fed's mind. I'd be in favor of reducing the size of institutions so that we no longer have "systematically important institutions," but that doesn't carry much weight these days given Wall Street's influence in Washington.
Not that appeals to authority carry much weight, but among professional economists (I'm one) appeals to eliminate the Fed are seen as nutty. Also, much of this is covered in various college economics courses.
The current Scientific American has an interesting article on the path that manned exploration out of the Earth-Moon system might take. It employs aspects of the unmanned program to cut cots and to have a more flexible program. One interesting aspect is that the main spacecraft is parked in high earth orbit and human crews fly to it in a small craft. Once on the main craft, it does a swing by the Earth to get a speed boost. Its main engine is electric-power (off of solar arrays). While only part of the Scientific American article ("This Way to Mars," 12/2011 issue) is free, they do kindly provide links to its references at the bottom of the page. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=this-way-to-mars .
Apparently, you need about 100 tons in low Earth orbit for such a craft. That would be two launches of SpaceX's proposed Falcon Heavy. It seems way more likely to fly than NASA's proposed Space Launch System (SLS).
Projects like Modeling, http://modeling.asu.edu/ , are designed to ferret out misconceptions. They're typically deeply entrenched and you really have to address them head-on in really thoughtful ways. When you do, deep learning may then occur. Watching videos, not designed to ferret our misconceptions, isn't nearly as likely to do this.
This is totally anecdotal, but I've heard of reports of modeling instructors getting pressured to use Khan's videos. The former has sound pedagogy and tons of research behind it demonstrating improved student understanding and the latter has neither. Sigh.
To really assess you learning (if you're doing Newtonian Mechanics), see if your instructors will give you the "Force Concept Inventory." It's a standard in physics education research. For more on it, see http://modeling.asu.edu/r%26e/fci.pdf . As they put it, "(1) commonsense beliefs about motion and force are incompatible with Newtonian concepts in most respects, (2) conventional physics instruction produces little change in these beliefs, and (3) this result is independent of the instructor and the mode of instruction." At last count, Google Scholar reports 1,400 citations to this paper. It's that important. With Khan's videos as taped lectures, this research implies that they don't produce much deep learning.
At least in physics there is a HUGE body of evidence that telling is basically not teaching, be it lectures or videos. That is, one must confront student misconceptions and more generally understand how people learn. We don't learn deeply by watching. Seriously, what elite athlete learned by watching and listening?
Try out these links:
"Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos" https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/
"Improved Learning in a Large Enrollment Physics Class" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/index.html
"Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (the author is both a Nobel Laureate and a U.S. University Professor of the Year; he's currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President for science education)
It is a sad commentary that methods that have rigorously been shown to work, like http://modeling.asu.edu/ , could really use more funding when Khan gets such funding on just the publicity.
The site Software Carpentry aims to teach scientists and engineers key programming tools and approaches to write better code. There are many, many resources to help non-programmers write better code. The fellow who runs it, Greg Wilson, has done yeoman work in this regard. I was so impressed that I invited him to an academic conference and we were really pleased.
My entry into this problem is "Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing?" (from the American Scientist). It says everything that the article here does and much more. Highly recommended.
There is even evidence that watching Khan videos leads to a false sense of learning. See Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos" It basically shows that while students think they're learning a lot by watching videos, their actual learning is minimal.
A great into to all this is Wieman's Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" As he puts it, to increase learning, we need to use
At best, Khan Academy only does the third of these.
We certainly had booms and busts well before we had a central bank (i.e. the Fed, which was established in 1913). As time has gone by, they've generally gotten better at central banking; the period from 1982 to 2007 is often called the "Great Moderation" for this quarter century of stable growth: two mild recessions and stable and low inflation; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Moderation . Also, take a look at the real GDP data from http://measuringworth.com/usgdp/ (put together by economic historians) and note the falling volatility over the last century (easiest seen in the log view). Finally check out http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html (from the people who officially date recessions) and note the increasing length of expansions and shorter recessions.
They weren't paid, it was loaned, and all but some $30 billion came back. Also, we once let the financial system collapse and we didn't do a thing to stop it -- today it's widely known as the Great Depression. Back then 1/3 of banks in the U.S. shut their doors in the days before the FDIC. The details were different this time, but the impact could have been the same as bank capital went from $1.3 trillion to $.3 trillion in a few months. We complain that Washington doesn't "do the right thing," but in this case they did (Congress, Bush, and Obama), and now they catch hell for it. Finally, there's a reason that Bernanke was Time's Person of the Year.
If you teach physics, I hope that you've looked at what Physics Education Research (PER) has done. These physicists have shown how to teach this difficult subject much more effectively. One nice starting point is "Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf .The author, Carl Wieman, has a Nobel Prize, was Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities) and is currently Deputy Science Adviser to the President (for science education). If you're into video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI is quite good (the lecturer, Eric Mazur, is "only" a full professor at Harvard; of course there are many pubs too). Finally, the general portal to PER is http://www.compadre.org/per/ .
However, turning a lecture series into chat sessions "Students continually discuss concepts among themselves and with the instructor during class." is pretty dumbed down. The example given of result of a truck and car colliding seem to be in the Intro area, maybe to students who have to take Intro to Physics and aren't all that interested in it?
Yes and no.
It was an intro physics class, but at Harvard (with many pre-meds in the course; not sure if majors or not). Certainly the students were motivated and had had physics in high school. The point is that students could do calculations, but they didn't understand, in a fundamental way, Newton's Laws (kinda the point of an intro physics class). If you really don't understand them, then you haven't learned what that course is all about. Here's my favorite quote when one of the students was given the assessment with that question, that asked about everyday phenomena, like colliding cars and trucks: "How should I answer these questions? According to what you taught me or according to the way I usually think about these things?" (again, a Harvard student taught by someone who was regarded an excellent lecturer). When the results came back on the assessment, sure enough, these students largely didn't understand the fundamentals.
In http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI and http://www.compadre.org/per/items/detail.cfm?ID=4990 Mazur (sorry, both are quite long) describes the same thing with circuits -- students could do the math, but couldn't describe what would happen if a light bulb was pulled out of a simple one. In short, they didn't fundamentally understand the concepts. There is a large literature in physics education research that on a fundamental level students don't understand the key concepts. One leading paper on this (the leading one?) is http://modeling.asu.edu/r&e/fci.pdf (some 1,000 cites from the scholarly literature) . It makes for sobering reading.
Having a clicker response from everyone to questions every few minutes in your lecture I guess is feedback that your points are getting across or not, but I still think it's dumb. It was the open conversation chatting amongst each other and lecturer that was engaging in Mazur's class, not primarily the clicker.
Rather than "dumb," this literature finds that such techniques leads to students who (i) can do calculations as well as those in a traditional class and (ii) have a better fundamental understanding. This really isn't too surprising as they're actually doing physics with a lot of frequent feedback from their clicker responses and discussions with each other to carefully crafted questions designed to help ferret out their common misconceptions. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI (quite short) where students are much more engaged than in the typical lecture. Part of that is students committing anonymously to a question (via clickers). With no questions, there is a strong temptation for students to say, "Yeah, I understand that." Many times, in fact, they don't.
Yes, the clicker is just a means to an end (shouldn't all technology in teaching be that?) -- getting students to commit anonymously to an answer. As Mazur says in http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf , you can get the same basic results with cards that students hold up and where they can't easily see each other's cards. As you say, and I'm sure that Mazur agrees, key is the discussion with other students and with Mazur.
One more direct role for technology here is that students at first do on-line homeworks that are used to guide the selection of ques
As a college professor (economics), I take pretty seriously the work of physicists like Carl Wieman (Nobel Prize, 2001, U.S. Professor of the Year (research universities), 2004; and currently associate science adviser to the President) and Eric Mazur (Harvard). They and many other serious physicists have carefully studied how students learn in their field. They've found that things like clickers, correctly used, and simulations can indeed aid learning in deep ways. Here's some links to summaries of their work: http://www.laspau.harvard.edu/idia/mecesup/readings/Eric_Mazur/Mazur_52364.pdf (Mazur -- short, in the journal Science) http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf (Wieman -- longer) Here's a key part of the primary literature; it has more than 1,000 cites: http://web.mit.edu/rsi/www/2005/misc/minipaper/papers/Hake.pdf (the most frequent method of "interactive engagement" is clickers). Yeah, I guess they're educational activists, but they're also leading physicists and have tons of research to back up their claims.
For evidence that isn't anecdotal and dates from 1982, see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7618722 . This got a lot of play when it came out. I also teach at college and this research certainly jives with my experience.