Variation in active learning implementation and impacts

Several active learning pedagogies are widely implemented in undergraduate physics courses, however the ways in which each pedagogy is carried out in practice (i.e., the activities that take place during class time) and the impacts of each pedagogy on student learning are not well understood. Here we measure classroom behaviors (e.g., students passively listening, answering clicker questions, or filling out worksheets) and student understanding in four such pedagogies: Peer Instruction, Tutorials, SCALE-UP, and ISLE. We collected classroom video recordings and student conceptual inventory scores from over 25 instructors implementing one of these pedagogies in their introductory mechanics course. We analyzed the videos using the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS), documenting both student and instructor behaviors at two-minute time intervals. In this talk, we present the results of a Latent Profile Analysis applied to these COPUS observations. We characterize the resulting profiles—indicating groups of courses with similar classroom behaviors—and relate profile membership to pedagogy and student conceptual inventory scores.