While a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, I spearheaded a project to assess the effectiveness of Peer Instruction (PI), a teaching strategy that gets students more actively engaged in the classroom by posing questions to them throughout class. We published articles with our findings that PI was very successful at increasing students' understanding of physics both at Harvard, where Eric Mazur first developed this method, and elsewhere. I also coordinated the dissemination of materials for teaching with PI to make it easier for faculty around the country to use this method.
In particular, we examined whether the interactive engagement methods developed by many physics education researchers around the country help ameliorate the gender gap in performance in introductory physics, both at Harvard and elsewhere. We found that teaching interactively indeed helped the female students catch up to the male students at Harvard, and helped somewhat elsewhere. It appears that a course needs to be thoroughly interactive if the gender gap is to be ameliorated or eliminated; adding a few interactive activities to an otherwise passively taught course did not help much.
Since coming to Swarthmore, I have continued a collaboration on gender issues in introductory physics with Jessica Watkins and Eric Mazur at Harvard University.
Finally, while a postdoctoral fellow, my colleagues and I examined whether lecture demonstrations are an effective way of helping students learn physics concepts, and found that preceding the demonstration by asking students to predict the outcome increased students' understanding of the demonstration, as measured by testing students' ability to explain the demonstration at the end of the course.