Effectiveness of Workshop Style Teaching in Students' Learning of Introductory Electricity and Magnetism

We have developed an interactive workshop-style course for our introductory calculus-based physics sequence at Trinity University. ~Lecture is limited to approximately 15 min. at the beginning of class, and the remainder of the 50-min. class is devoted to inquiry-based activities and problem solving. ~So far, lab is done separately and we have not incorporated the lab component into the workshop model. ~We use the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) to compare learning gains between the workshop and traditional lecture-based course for the Spring 2012 semester. ~Both the workshop and lecture courses shared the same inquiry-based lab component that involved pre-labs, prediction-observation and post-lab activities. ~Our BEMA results indicate statistically significant improvement in overall learning gains compared to the traditional course. ~We compare our workshop BEMA scores both to traditional lecture scores here at Trinity and to those from other institutions.