Introduction

Anybody who has done a course at a corporate training centre will have been struck by the dramatic contrast between their teaching methods, and those generally employed in undergraduate astronomy and physics courses. In most undergraduate courses, the teacher stands at the front presenting a stream of information, which the students copy down. Occasional questions are asked, but the students are essentially passive throughout. In corporate training centres, most classroom time is devoted to role-playing simulations, business games and discussion sessions. Students are active throughout: students speak for more of the time than their teachers.

Why do corporations spend big money on such unorthodox teaching methods? Abundant research shows that students taught in conventional lectures, even those who perform very well in conventional assessment, are often quite unable to apply their knowledge effectively in real-world situations. Conventionally taught students tend to rote-learn: they fail to integrate their new knowledge into their prior assumptions, and they rarely think through the implications of what they learn. For these reasons, increasing numbers of universities are experimenting with teaching techniques that present information to students in more life-like ways, and which encourage the integration of a student's knowledge.

We have recently been experimenting with applying some of these corporate techniques to undergraduate astronomy and physics lectures at the Australian National University (ANU). This paper is a case study of some of our first experiments. We have yet to conduct a quantitative analysis of the effects of these exercises, although student feedback was very supportive of the approach. Nonetheless, we hope that an account of these techniques, and some of the lessons learned, may be of value to other lecturers looking for ways to enliven their lectures. These techniques can be seen as a variant of interactive tutorial teaching methods.

After briefly reviewing the literature on group-learning in Sectioná 2, we present a detailed case study of a role-playing exercise used in an astronomy lecture in Sectioná 3. We then briefly discuss other role-playing exercises (Sectioná 4) before the summary. Copies of all the exercises we used are included in the electronic version of this paper as appendices.

á© Copyright Astronomical Society of Australia 1997