Swinburne University of Technology - Melbourne Australia

Learning springs from Dr Mazzolini's box of tricks

Story by Robin Taylor

The cardboard box on Dr Alex Mazzolini’s desk holds a collection of simple items: a piece of folded white paper, a plastic lens, a piece of plastic optical fibre and a three-colour LED light connected to a small circuit board that is hooked up to batteries. The whole assembly can be bought for about $20 yet demonstrates the latest ideas in fibre optic communications.

It is with kits like this that Dr Mazzolini, Associate Dean (Learning and Teaching) in the Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology, is changing the way students, especially in the world’s developing countries, learn about science and engineering.

In his role as Chair of the Asian Physics Education Network (ASPEN) – a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) funded group that aims to improve physics education in developing countries – Dr Mazzolini uses his kits and ‘active learning’ techniques to enthuse physics students.

Dr Mazzolini is also one of the founders of the UNESCO program on active learning in optics and photonics (ALOP). He says the ALOP program trains physics teachers by improving their understanding of optics and showing them how to inspire students using active learning techniques – the antithesis of rote learning.

He and his ALOP colleagues have held workshops in a number of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Dr Mazzolini says the workshops have led to follow-on activities. After a recent workshop in Morocco, for example, the local education department is now trying to introduce active learning in 200 schools by using ALOP-style workshops to train 700 teachers.

Dr Mazzolini tries to run his workshops using local materials; an aspiration that often has him scouring hawkers’ stalls and markets for rulers, light bulbs, mirrors, laser pointers, plasticine and LED torches. These local materials can then be used to demonstrate many simple experiments in optics, such as reflection, refraction, interference, diffraction and scattering.

But it is not just developing countries that can benefit from the active learning approach. Dr Mazzolini is also running active learning workshops for lecturers at Swinburne.

Active learning involves interactive demonstrations and tutorials, and students working in groups. Dr Mazzolini’s team is replacing a ‘recipe’ approach with exploration and discovery.

“The idea of the workshops is to expose academics and teachers to new ways of learning,” he says. “Many students have deep-seated misconceptions about what they learn, which we need to confront.”

Dr Mazzolini puts it this way: in a traditional ‘passive’ learning class a teacher or lecturer will tell the students something which they then have to learn. It seems straightforward because it is one-directional. But Dr Mazzolini doubts it does much to improve students’ basic understanding.

In an active learning approach, students are asked to predict what will happen in certain situations. For example, when someone throws a ball in the air, what is the acceleration at the instant the ball momentarily stops at the top of its path? 

“All students have to make a commitment, then you set up an experiment where you measure the acceleration (and find that it is constant throughout the motion, even when the ball is momentarily stopped), then students can discuss the results and why these results might be different from their predictions. This is an important step in trying to elicit real learning,” Dr Mazzolini explains.

“Similarly, in a lab or practical class, you set up a scenario where you ask them to predict something, then they observe what actually happens and you ask them to explain any difference between their predictions and what they observed.”

Although he says the active learning approach takes longer than conventional teaching, it engages students and allows them to develop a deeper understanding of the subject.

“You can’t cover the same syllabus that you would normally, but I would contend that if you cover the whole syllabus in a passive learning approach you would be surprised by how little students actually learn. This is because you have not allowed students to confront their misconceptions.”

After observing the results of Dr Mazzolini’s approach at Swinburne, the University of Canberra (UC) is also introducing active learning into its computer science and engineering courses.

Dean of the Faculty of Information Sciences and Engineering at UC, Professor Dharmendra Sharma, says universities need to respond to changes in the teaching/learning environment and student expectations. “We want students to feel that their time through university prepares them well for life-long learning,” he says. Professor Sharma has no doubt that active learning improves the student experience.

“It is evident through the results of student surveys in some of our units that after only one semester they are much more involved in the subject,” he says.