Dr. Isaac Perez Castillo
Departamento de Física, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa
Título: From pilot contrast to course-wide improvement: active learning, assessment alignment, and scaling change in elementary mechanics I
Resumen: For Elementary Mechanics I at UAM-Iztapalapa the historical situation had long been problematic: as broad context, the overall pass rate was 44.3%, with a substantial section-to-section variability. This seminar presents the evolution of an active-learning initiative in Elementary Mechanics I at UAM-Iztapalapa across the two consecutive trimesters 25-O and 26-I, moving from a pilot comparison in 25-O to a broader scaling phase in 26-I. By active learning, we refer to a family of instructional approaches in which students are consistently engaged in sense-making activities during class—such as structured problem solving, peer discussion, and formative questioning—while the instructor shifts from primarily delivering content to guiding, diagnosing, and responding to student thinking. In this implementation, the label of active learning —and traditional lecturing— is operational: it reflects sections where instructors and teaching assistants were trained, supported, and monitored in the sustained use of these practices, rather than adherence to a single prescribed method.
In 25-O, the first implementation combined workshops, TA preparation, aligned materials, classroom observation, and continuous coordination, and it was initially deployed in 2 actively supported sections while 6 additional sections remained outside the training sequence. Under the common departmental exams, the active-learning sections outperformed the traditional-lecture sections on every measured outcome: 48.3% versus 36.0% on the first midterm, 41.7% versus 35.5% on the second midterm, 55.6% versus 32.6% on the global exam, and 67.7% versus 50.2% on the final mark. The largest advantage appeared on the global exam, with a gain of 22.9 percentage points, and the final mark also showed a strong advantage of 17.5 percentage points. This first term therefore provided a clear proof of principle under a shared assessment standard.
In 26-I, the initiative moved beyond a pilot comparison. More instructors had already participated in a January 2026 workshop, before the trimester began, and the work on explicit learning goals and exam alignment had spread across more sections. The central result in this term was therefore not a larger separation between a small pilot group and everyone else, but a substantial improvement across the course as a whole. Pooling all sections, pass rates rose from 39.5% to 72.8% on the first midterm, from 37.2% to 62.7% on the second midterm, and from 55.0% to 71.9% on the final mark, corresponding to 304 passing students out of 423 recorded final grades. In that setting, the original AL–TL contrast narrowed, not because the initiative stopped working, but because improvement had spread beyond the initial pilot sections. The global exam remained the hardest common benchmark in 26-I and, unlike the first midterm, second midterm, and final mark, did not improve relative to the pooled 25-O result. This may be largely attributed to a series of external factors like Easter break, by the fact that many students had already done enough to pass the course before that exam, and by an extra project that affected one of the AL groups. Even so, overall course success increased sharply across the course, especially on the midterms and the final mark.
Taken together, these two terms tell a coherent story. The first showed that a supported active-learning implementation could outperform traditional lecturing under common departmental assessments; the second showed that once training, coordination, and assessment alignment began to diffuse across the course, the most important outcome was a dramatic rise in overall student success. For a difficult gateway physics course with a long history of low and unstable pass rates, these results are exceptional by any reasonable departmental standard.
