Colleges Cope With Bigger Classes

Many reforms also take money. If there were enough money, big classes wouldn't exist in the first place.

But state and federal policymakers are clamoring for more accountability and better graduation rates, and if faculty don't step up, bureaucrats might. Big classes are the obvious place to focus. The National Center for Academic Transformation, or NCAT, estimates that the 25 most common college courses _ in subjects like economics, English, psychology and the sciences _ account for 35 percent of four-year college enrollment nationally. That means a lot of people are taking a relative handful of courses.

Colorado, with a long tradition on innovative science teaching, is one of a number of campuses making significant changes in how at least some large introductory courses are taught and organized. Others include Maryland, MIT, Virginia Tech, Clemson and the University of Alabama.

The reforms go beyond simply reducing class sizes or encouraging lecturers to speak with more animation, though that's an element. Details vary, but one theme is a shift from a passive model of absorbing a lecturer's words to a more active one where lecturers guide and measure, but students learn the material more independently.

It's not necessarily popular with students, but the cognitive research says it is the way to make learning stick.

"In a traditional course the faculty are doing all the work and the students are watching," said Carol Twigg, president and CEO of NCAT, which is working with hundreds of universities to improve giant courses. "In a redesigned course, students are doing the work and faculty are stepping in as needed."

Wieman is at the vanguard of the reform movement, but it's really his second career. In his first he was a researcher with a rare distinction: He produced a new state of matter. Most people know the three most common states of matter _ solid, liquid and gas. But cooling rubidium nearly to absolute zero, Wieman and Colorado colleague Eric Cornell formulated the first Bose-Einstein condensate, a state in which several thousand atoms align perfectly and behave as a single "super atom."

After his Nobel, Wieman could easily have focused on lab work or training a cadre of elite graduate students.

But Wieman uses his clout to secure invitations to talk to his fellow scientists _ about teaching. He has become one of several physicists to take up the cause, along with Eric Mazur at Harvard, Edward Redish at Maryland and Robert Beichner at North Carolina State.

Wieman wears tennis shoes and walks everywhere like he's in a hurry. He is.

"I have ridiculous, grandiose visions," he said, speaking in his temporary office overlooking Colorado's football stadium. "I want to change how everybody learns science. I won't get into how this will save mankind, but it may."

The problem, he said, is that scientists stop acting like scientists when it comes to their own teaching.