Innovative Teaching Techniques and U.S.-Developed Materials

In common with many other universities, we recently introduced some innovative teaching techniques in two introductory physics courses at the University of Toronto [1]. These included Peer Instruction, Interactive Demonstrations, and Activity-Based Tutorials. For many of these, we used classroom-tested materials from U.S. universities, and found that they were often insufficiently challenging for our students. We hypothesize that this may be true generally of U.S.-developed teaching materials for Canadian students.