"It's hard on students since we have to make it known to the professor what's difficult for us, and not the other way around," Kier says.

Back To The Future

Mazur has been teaching physics at Harvard for 16 years, but it was not until 10 years ago that he realized the traditional approach of lecturing to teach the sciences was not working.

"I was getting extremely high CUE ratings," he says, "and people were doing well on exams, so I thought I was doing it right."

Of the complaints he heard, the most frequent was that he lectured from the book. But according to Mazur, that is what he was doing: he prepared a lecture from the textbook, copied the lecture onto the blackboard during class and watched the students copy what he wrote into their own notebooks--just like most lecturers did at the time.

But he realized when he gave his students what he thought to be a fairly simple exam on basic physics concepts that something was amiss.

"They were doing triple integrals and complex calculus, and I was afraid that by giving them this exam they'd be angry with me," he says. "Not because it was hard, but because it would be so easy."

This wasn't the case, as it turned out the class found the conceptual exam very difficult.