We all hear that traditional college lectures are on the way out. I don’t know the facts, but I’m told that they’re not nearly as “educational” as “active learning” experiences, in which students use computers or teach each other, or as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), in which a professor lectures online and the students take e-tests. There are presumably data that back up the inferiority of traditional lectures, although I don’t whether the newer learning experiences have been compared to, say, small humanities seminars.
I don’t have strong feelings about this, for if one method teaches students better than another, we should by all means use the best one. And of course MOOCs, like the one on genetics and evolution taught at Duke by my ex-student Mohamed Noor, have brought high-quality education to students who either aren’t near a college or don’t have the substantial dosh it takes to get a regular college education.
But in some ways I mourn the passing of the lecture. Yes, they may bore students, or not teach them what we want, but I suppose I’m being selfish in saying that I’ve always found a good lecture fascinating and entertaining, and, from behind the lectern, it’s simply great fun to try to bring your subject alive.
In Sunday’s New York Times, writer and professor Molly Worthen defended the traditional lecture in a piece called “Lecture me. Really.” It’s a spirited defense of tradition, but in the end the data will tell—and Worthen gives precious little data. What she does give, upfront, is a pretty transparent motivation for her defense:
But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the “sage on the stage” with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences — fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.
Now one could take this to mean that scientific demonstrations (i.e., surveys and data) showing that active learning trumps lectures are to be feared—in other words, a cry of “scientism.” But, so it seems, Worthen just feels that the humanities are different in how they get students to learn, and that learning humanities (Worthen teaches history) is best done by traditional lectures. Those lectures, she says, foster a set of skills unattainable by newer methods. What works for science education shouldn’t automatically be transferred to the humanities:
Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media. More and more of my colleagues are banning the use of laptops in their classrooms. They say that despite initial grumbling, students usually praise the policy by the end of the semester. “I think the students value a break from their multitasking lives,” Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and an award-winning teacher, told me. “The classroom is an unusual space for them to be in: Here’s a person talking about complicated ideas and challenging books and trying not to dumb them down, not playing for laughs, requiring 60 minutes of focused attention.”
I too banned laptops from my required evolution course, for I once watched from the back of the room when my co-teacher lectured, and observed that most students weren’t taking notes on their laptops, but reading email and playing on Facebook. Worthen continues:
. . . [Harvard President] Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms [of lectures] with a grain of salt. In the humanities, a good lecture class does just what Newman said: It keeps students’ minds in energetic and simultaneous action. And it teaches a rare skill in our smartphone-app-addled culture: the art of attention, the crucial first step in the “critical thinking” that educational theorists prize.
Fine. Where are the data? Or does Worthen, while abjuring the methods of science teaching, also abjure the need for empirical support of her views?
Worthen goes on to elaborate on the skills that a good lecture imparts—so long as students know how to listen properly, which involves not frenetically taking notes, but listening hard and mentally arguing with the professor as she speaks. Worthen calls this “an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.” Worthen considers the art of note-taking especially important, for if you do it right, you learn to distill a complex argument to its bare essentials. Such a skill, she says, imparts the lesson that “listening is not the same thing as thinking about what you plan to say next — and that critical thinking depends on mastery of facts, not knee-jerk opinions.”
I have some sympathy for Worthen, for that is exactly how I trained myself to learn as an undergraduate. I limited myself to a half-page of lecture notes per session (except for complicated science courses), and would go over those notes each evening for several hours, trying to reconstruct the lecture from which they came. And I found that technique both fulfilling and instructive—and I did okay in college. Now that I’m on the other side of the lectern, I also follow Worthen’s methods, which she describes as follows:
Holding their attention is not easy. I lecture from detailed notes, which I rehearse before each class until I know the script well enough to riff when inspiration strikes. I pace around, wave my arms, and call out questions to which I expect an answer. When the hour is done, I’m hot and sweaty. A good lecturer is “someone who conveys that there’s something at stake in what you’re talking about,” Dr. Delbanco said. Or as Ms. Severson told me, “I’m a pretty shy person, but when I lecture, there’s a certain charisma. This stuff matters to me — it saved my life.”
This is precisely what I do, and when I lecture I’m pretty much exhausted for the next few hours, covered with sweat and chalk dust and requiring caffeine (I rarely show Powerpoints in science class). But if the lecture went well, I feel great.
But that is a bit self-indulgent. In the end, what really matters is this: which method of instruction is the best way to impart both the knowledge and the learning and thinking skills we want students to acquire? To answer that question, of course, requires data, which in turn requires us to find ways to measure the intangible results we’re hired to promote. Worthen gives no such data, but merely an assertion that the traditional lecture is the best way to teach humanities students how to dissect arguments and think for themselves.
That may well be, but an assertion is just that—an unsupported claim. There may be data backing Worthen’s argument, but I suspect not, or she would have adduced them. From a more self-aggrandizing viewpoint, it might feel a bit dispiriting to be removed from the role of authority figure and entertainer that constitutes the lecturing professor. After all, there are few things as gratifying in academia as having given a good lecture that excites the students and prompts a lot of questions.
Because I was brought up on traditional lectures, from both sides of the podium, I sympathize with Worthen’s views. And she may be right. I’d just like to see the data.
As always, readers are invited to weigh in on this argument.
Subscribe. (I will take notes).
I teach a graduate level cell biology class, and this year I fundamentally altered the way that I teach it, by dispensing with the formal didactic lecture and instead using a more interactive strategy where I walk the students through the discovery process and how we know what we know about basic cell biological processes. For example, for the topic of ER-associated degradation (a process by which misfolded ER proteins are dislocated out of the ER to the cytosol for destruction by the proteasome), I asked the students to propose ways that the cell might deal with misfolded ER proteins (resident proteases, lyssosome, etc.) and walked through the data excluding these. Then I asked them whether the proteasome might be involved, and if so, how this might be tested, and so on.
I did this because I am convinced that, at least for a class like the one I teach, a didactic lecture is a waste of time. I am not (or at least should not be) trying to pass along “information,” most of which they could either look up in a basic cell biology text or by reading a review or two (which is how all of us who practice this trade do it). Rather, my job is to train them to be scientists, and to help them understand the thought process and the approaches involved in the context of cell biology. I think this approach is better, although the metrics for assessing that are nebulous.
Sounds much better to me.
Have you banned laptops and the like so that students are not distracted?
I think the key here is that yours is a graduate level class.
Our chemistry department uses only ‘guided inquiry’ for all of their introductory undergraduate courses because that is what ACS says to do. Failure rates are higher than before, students provide almost all negative feedback at the end of the course (students that are ‘above average’ and self-motivating and interested in the material in the first place, shockingly, do quite well), and they can cover only about 75% of the material that they covered before.
In fact, in every instance in which a very excited colleague (including colleagues from other universities) has given a talk on the superiority of the ‘flipped’ classroom or guided inquiry or whatever name it goes by today, it has come out in the Q&A that they cover less material, that passing rates are not much better than before (but, again, those that did well did REALLY well), etc. – in one case, a professor form an elite liberal arts college in Virginia laid out this tale of how fantastic this was and that everyone should be doing – until it was revealed in the end that in their program, only students that had a certain GPA (I believe it was 3.25 or above), were in certain programs, came from certain socio-economic backgrounds, etc, were allowed into the program. When asked if this might explain the success, she admitted that it ‘probably’ did, but that this did not mean that the program was fantastic.
Bottom line, I don’t think I will convert any time soon.
“…which method of instruction is the best way to impart both the knowledge and the learning and thinking skills we want students to acquire?”
Unfortunately, there probably isn’t a simple answer to this. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work in any setting.
First, you are not taking into consideration differences in learning style. Some people do just fine in a lecture format, and some are more hands-on.
Second, why should any course be just lecture? Why not mix it up? When I was teaching, I tried to lecture sometimes and do activities sometimes. If a piece of information can be described and then tried out, so much the better.
Third, not every professor is a good lecturer, no matter how engrossing the subject might be. One of the worst classes I had as an undergrad was entitled “Population”. I was so excited to take the course, since I thought it would be about a lot more than it turned out to be. The prof spoke in a monotone, and most of the course was about Malthus. Groan.
Fourth, the answer to this might also vary with the subject matter. Most science courses have separate lab time, but a lot of other courses don’t. It might also vary with the size of the section. Research has shown that no matter how large the group, breaking it up into smaller groups has a positive impact on the students’ experience. Personally, I hated courses where we sat in a filled auditorium. I did much better in seminars.
And, I went to school before the age of electronic devices, so staving off the boredom meant knitting. L
Ha! I had one professor in the first session of a lecture announce: “Ladies, I don’t want knitting during my lecture!” *much grumbling from the audience* Next week a man pointedly started to knitt. You could have heard a pin drop as we waited for the reaction. *splutter* *mumble* “Errrm yeah, Gentlemen are forbidden to knitt too!” *roaring laughter*
Yes, the lecture was yawn inducing.
Was purl still allowed?
One knit, one purl, one knit, one purl…
Mr. Sourpuss Prof was an equal opportunity thread working banner.
You are exactly right. One size does not fit all. What educators should be doing is trying to stimulate students interest and curiosity so that they educate themselves. This works differently for different students. I have to say from my own university days that auditorium lectures were about the worst way to promote student interest since there is basically no interaction with the lecturer. In CompSci & physics it was the labs that really hooked me.
I’ve always regretted that I never had a chance to experience the Oxford tutorial system – i think i’d have done better with that than anything else. But of course it’s not compatible with the mass ‘education’ system of North America nor with its economics.
I made better grades when I just listened to the lecture, rather than taking notes, but I got intimidated into note-taking.
I take terrible notes. Trying to listen while also organizing my thoughts enough in order to take notes means that I don’t do either well.
I’ve found that most teachers just teach the book in their lectures. In that case, why should I attend or listen if I do?
I’d rather college just be self-study, with a teacher available to answer questions if necessary. However, there does need to be some pressure to learn difficult concepts, or else people will intellectually take the easy way out. This is why MOOCs will never make a dent in the education market.
I’m an old fogie decades out of school, but I still take notes in meetings and at presentations.
Though the older I get, the less “parallel” the process. In general, now I take a few notes every 5-10 minutes that capture the gist of the last 5-10 minutes of talk, rather than trying to get every word down verbatim.
I just doodle.
Early in my schooling days I found that if I took notes that I didn’t need to ever use them, but if I didn’t take notes then I didn’t absorb the lecture as well and wished that I had taken some notes. The process of taking notes apparently helped me remeber things better.
This made me rather upset with the universe, having to takes notes but never having to actually use them.
Now, not quite old but definitely tending in that direction, I find I need to take notes just as before but unlike when I was young I also will definitely need to use those notes in the future. This also makes me rather upset with the universe.
I’ve seen a study that endorsed what you say. Either I have exceptionally good listening skills or else exceptionally poor writing skills. 😉
sub
K-12 teachers receive a lot more training on how to teach, and based on what I see my children get, these teachers have certainly embraced the activity-based, inquiry-based learning more than I was ever exposed to.
However, the risk is that these activities come at the expense of a broader overall framework that is perhaps best transmitted via lecture. My daughter was completely adrift in a history class in which the students did all of the lectures. They did the research, made PowerPoints, and delivered the lectures. But the result was a disconnected series of essentially anecdotes of widely varying quality, and no instructor lectures to tie everything together or provide context.
Personally, I try to give engaging lectures that include PowerPoint slides showing geologic data, which I then ask the class to analyze. I don’t know how effective it is compared to other methods, but students do like it.
Students giving lectures is a terrible idea. I don’t view that as activity-based instruction.
And teaching students to use PP might be making the world a worse place to live:
http://users.ha.uth.gr/tgd/pt0501/09/Tufte.pdf
My kids started having power point assignments in 5th grade. It is horrible.
I think students giving lectures could be a very good learning tool. Oral presentations of long term projects for example. But definitely not as the primary method of teaching the class.
It probably is a good learning tool for the kids giving the presentations, but not for the victims…er, other students. I suppose that someone has to suffer, though, if there is to be an audience to practice on.
*laughing*
Victims is about right. Most student oral presentations are pretty awful.
I am a scientist and I found what worked best for me was to be given the basic information before the lecture(s), either in notes, or from interactive studies, and then to go into the lecture to listen to more complex arguments. These reinforced learning and allowed discussion amongst the class, who were not intimidated as they already had a basic understanding.
I was not frantically taking notes, as in other lectures, and could really listen. My notes from the lectures were concise but far more thoughtful.
When I had the opportunity to give a few college lectures, I used this mixed method and it was received well and given good reviews at the end of the course.
More than a half-century ago I enjoyed traditional lectures (in physics, with subsidiary mathematics; this was in the UK, so no general/humanities courses). I am not sure how otherwise the concentrated and progressive subject matter could have been conveyed. The interactive stuff occurred after the lectures, in conversations with friends.
Being in the UK did you have a tutor to go over problems with etc. in addition?
My tutor was useless. To say that he did not take tutoring seriously would be a gross understatement. He was far to busy being an ostentatious Christian and making pots of money from external consultancy to bother with mere students. Most of my colleagues had good to excellent tutors.
Well, at least in some sense the institution was there, and that’s good – in the sense that I wouldn’t want to have certain courses where the only contact is a lecture.
I was an Oxford Chemist in the late 60s, and I must say I got a lot more out of the weekly tutorials and seminars than out of the lectures.
Learning is still driven by personal motivation. As for the traditional lecture, its value depends on the lecturer, the audience, and the topic.
One problem with most lectures is that the speaker may be brilliant and an excellent writier, but is a poor speaker. The worst are those who read their script or load up computer slides with more words or complex graphics tha can be comprehended.
If the purpose of discourse is encouraging insight, the lecture can identify context and nudge the active learner to seek more.
Still, the onus is always on the learner.
Of course Jerry is right to point out that the NYT article didn’t give any data to back up the idea that lectures are valuable, perhaps more so than hands-on activities, as apparently some research shows. And naturally the professor who likes to lecture has a bias. But to the extent that colleges really are phasing out lectures in the humanities, I agree that’s not a good thing. Like any type of class, whether it’s valuable or not will depend in large part on the teacher; there will be some bad lectures. But the one thing you *should* get at college is the opportunity to be in a room with a really brilliant person who knows their area and wants to tell you all about it. There’s nothing like it. Do you get less personal interaction in a gigantic lecture room? Of course, but if the prof is worthy, so what, for that one class? And such classes always break down for smaller discussion groups during the week.
Plus, listening and figuring out the important points to jot down is a skill to be used in every walk of life while trying to understand explanations, from listening to policy experts to the plumber explaining why you need a costly job done. And because the process involves jotting down notes, it IS an active one, if students are focused and taking notes rather than vegging out. I admit I don’t have the studies at my fingertips, but I know I’ve read about studies showing that writing things out, such as note-taking, makes your brain work in such a way as to enhance comprehension and memory. I know it does for me.
Hands on, great–but everything should be a part of the whole, not the whole thing.
I will be very unhappy if I find out the tuition I’m shelling out for my kids’ tuition doesn’t include some lectures. Now I have to go ask them about it.
This touches on some concerns that I have about accounting for the different variables in judging the effectiveness of a lecture versus, say, an active learning classroom. There are a large range of teaching styles that I would call a ‘lecture’. These range from a competent and clear but dry of info –> an animated and passionate lecture with questions directed to the audience that require their attention and participation. And lets not forget the usefulness of telling a joke whose funnyness only can be appreciated if one understood the material so far.
So if a study finds that active learning is more effective, how do I know that it is not being compared to a dry lecture?
I learned well in lecture classes. I listened, took notes, drew elaborate doodles when not quite fully engaged, and learned a lot. The process was also efficient; in most classes, if I attended lecture and paid attention, that was enough to do well on tests.
In my own classes, I do a lot of lecture. Powerpoint is great for showing complicated diagrams, but I’ve relied on it too much at times; better to be able to spontaneously draw on the board, especially in response to student questions. In some short classes I’ve given up on powerpoint. Perhaps my most successful class included lecture and once a week smaller groups discussing something and then each group presenting something. The best thing was that it helped students be willing to ask questions in lecture.
I think a mix of lecture and lab or lecture and discussion is good. I have some personal experience that pure lecture isn’t the best, but no other data!
“In some short classes I’ve given up on powerpoint. ”
Bless you. My heart sinks when I see someone start up PP. I almost immediately disengage.
While I grant that it’s possible to use PP effectively, most people don’t. It’s too tempting to use it as a crutch so that you don’t have to remember what to say or figure out how to engage the audience.
Not from Academia so I would not offer a best way to teach any subject but I think there is a similarity between best teachers and best managers. Some say the best are just born with the skills but that is probably rarely the case. They are both mostly learned vocations but you only get part of what you need from the books or the lecture. A sizable percentage is learned by experience and some from luck. The luck part is how good were the teaches you learned from or the managers you experienced. This can make a big difference in how good you become at either profession.
Maybe science classes have changed, but when I went to school we got the 3 lectures/week AND a 4-hour practical lab course. IOW it wasn’t that the standard lecture got replaced with active learning, it got supplemented by some additional active learning.
What the frak were they doing in HS then?
Even if it’s new, its an important life skill for most white collar professionals. You WILL go to presentations and long meetings. You WILL be expected to sit there and pay attention. You WILL be expected to understand what you heard and repeat it back later.
I’m not arguing traditional lectures are a better learning style than MOOCs or other styles. Like Jerry, I’m somewhat agnostic and would probably just accept whatever answer the data gave. But I don’t see anything “new” or “hard” about sitting your butt in a chair and actively listening (meaning: taking notes if you need to) to speakers for an hour at a time.
Some thoughts, relevant, I hope, to your comment. It is counter intuitive that lectures are ineffective. Across the spectrum of life activities, we communicate by using spoken language. We usually do not have graphics or pp at hand, when we converse, with which to better make our points.
If the lecturer has something to convey, he/she can usually succeed in doing so. Lectures, in whatever size classes, are often bad because there is nothing substantive in the subject matter to convey. Paul Simon’s (Kodachrome) “When I think of all the crap I learned in college(sic) etc.” is so on target.
Does it matter? There are, it seems to me, more brilliant people around than ever before.
I think at present lectures are often a necessary evil, since with funding being low most places, small classes, conference/recitations/tutorials are harder to offer, etc.
However, in the limit, they should be minimized, since there are books (or other texts) to read to convey much of the material. I guess it somewhat depends on whether you are doing a course where the reading is an addition vs. if it is a reinforcement.
For me, I could learn a lot of different ways…lecture, hand’s-on, self-study. What mattered most was my interest in the subject. I received many more “A’s” in college, because I took courses that were of interest, and I also sought out teachers that were highly regarded. And that leads me to the other factor- good teachers. A good lecturer who kept you engaged is key. Anyone who has gone to school will remember the droning teacher (“Bueller, Bueller”)…I hated going to lectures like that, and my learning and grades suffered. However, I did best and learned most in classes where I really respected the teacher/professor and wanted to please him/her (very similar in how we try to please our parents as children). Professors like that were the rarest of sorts though. I had maybe 5 or 6 in K-12 and only a few in higher education.
I really dislike Powerpoint, but have no choice regarding its use, since we’re required to provide both Powerpoints and lecture notes to the students for each lecture and review session. Every lecture is video recorded, and the students have those to watch as well. Our curricula (Powerpoints, lecture notes, lab manuals, textbooks) are all electronic now, so we can’t ban laptops/tablets/smartphones from the classroom. Most quizzes and exams are also taken on computers, and we often have an audience response component, for which students can use laptops or smartphones.
For anyone else who’s not a fan of Powerpoints, I highly recommend Edward Tufte’s essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. The image on the cover will give you a laugh too.
You are far more digitized and pixelated than I. But I use Power Point because it provides a rich platform for amazing pictures that I use from a wide range of subjects, and you can embed animations right in them and also draw on the screen.
I used to teach strictly from the blackboard and from overhead transparencies that I would partly prepare in advance, then write in as I went along. I was so used to that, that when I did make the jump to PPT that I remember really hating it since I saw that it became the focus and not me or my words.
So I learned and adjusted. My PPTS now emphasize pictures, with only brief bits of text. The whole story is what I give them verbally, with doodles on the screen with an annotation pen right in the PPT slide. So what I do now is a good compromise that uses the strengths of different teaching styles.
I’m much more digixilated than I care to be! Powerpoint works well as a “projector” or platform, especially for biological images and diagrams – even Edward Tufte admits as much in his one-day course (worth every penny, IMO). My students get a lot of the details in the accompanying lecture notes that I write, so I can reduce the amount of text on the PPT slides.
I also draw a lot of pathways, timelines, and other diagrams with the students – unfortunately, the lecture halls are too large and/or poorly designed to use the chalkboards for this (although it isn’t a problem in the anatomy labs). So I use a document camera that’s connected to the projection system, which also allows me to show and manipulate various models I make out of polymer clay, chenille stems, yarn, cardboard, etc. Drawing diagrams and pathways with the students is my favorite mode of teaching in the classroom (I also do a lot of lab teaching), because it slows me down and gives more students a chance to think about the information and ask questions. I always scan my drawings and post them online, but of course it’s more important for the students to draw out the information themselves. These methods of teaching require a hell of a lot of time and effort, and can be exhausting on top of anatomy lab teaching hours and other academic demands. You have to be really comfortable with the material and open to all kinds of questions. I wouldn’t do it any other way, but I’m not sure how long I can keep going at the same energy level, especially since teaching faculty are leaving/retiring, and not being replaced, and our contact hours count for less each year. :-/
Ugh, sorry that my comment required moderation … autofill on my computer loaded an incorrect e-mail addy. Perils of technology and all that.
Some PowerPoint presentations are not as horrible as others, but I agree that they are not my favorites. When I recently took Mohamed Noor’s MOOC on genetics, I printed out some of his slides and followed along while listening to the lectures, adding handwritten notes onto the print-outs. It worked pretty well.
As for learning from others…there was a real push for “Cooperative Group Learning” in our school district about 10 years ago. I found that in very small doses it can be effective, but generally the weaker kids relied on the stronger kids to do most of the work.
Many of my students print out PPT slides and take notes on them as well – I use light-colored backgrounds on the slides for that reason (can’t convince all faculty to do the same, though). Other students type notes directly into the PPT slides, so I post my lectures online in that format instead of as pdfs (of course it’s possible to type notes into a pdf, just not as convenient). But my preferred methods to make a traditional lecture a bit interactive are to incorporate the drawings and demonstrations, or to include audience response questions. My clinical teaching colleagues use the audience response option to great effect with case-based presentations.
There is a study by Scott Freeman et al (PNAS October 8 2013 in the efficacy of lecturing which supports active learning rather than lecturing.
Eric Mazur (Mazur Group, Harvard) continues to do some of the most interesting and best research on how to improve classroom learning which he practices. He probably is most associated with using clickers in the classroom to check on what students are learning.
He started on this path when he had a class take a standard, no a classic misconceptions test on forces and motion thinking that these are Harvard students and would ace it. They didn’t; they performed generally like most physics students everywhere else.
Rather than dissing the test he began his own inquiry into how students learn physics and has written many publications–found on his website (and he remains an active researcher in science as well).
This kind of research is being pursued by cognitive psychologists as well as scientists, many of them physicists, e.g.,. U. Mass, U. Maryland, U. Washington, Seattle (among the first initiated by the late Arnold Arons and Lillian McDermott).
There are several institutions that offer a Ph.D. in education in at least physics (not in the school of education) and possibly biology.
Carl Wieman who received a Nobel Prize in Physics (2001) has since taken an interest in science education and wrote a must-read paper title “Why Not Try A Scientific Approach to Science Education.”
Here’s a Wired article discussing the Freeman et. al paper, which was apparently a review paper: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/empzeal-active-learning/
One surprising quote from the Wired article: “Most of the studies we analyzed were based on data from identical instructors teaching active learning v. lecturing sections; some studies (e.g. Van Heuvelen in Am. J. Physics; Deslauriers et al. in Science) have purposely matched award-winning lecturers with inexperienced teachers who do active learning and found that the students did worse when given “brilliant lectures.”
Freeman et al. are colleagues of mine. Scott is my coauthor on the undergrad textbook Evolutionary Analysis (which was–ahem–missing from Greg’s recent reading list).
Freeman et al.’s paper is here:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410
They metaanalyzed studies from across science, technology, engineering, and math that experimentally compared any kind of active learning to traditional lectures. The take-home message is clear in these graphs:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410/F1.expansion.html
Students do better, on average, with active learning.
Just read the paper, interesting stuff. However AFAICS its mostly comparing “lecture with an active component” to “lecture only”, rather than “no lecture” to “lecture”. Plus they explicitly say they are only looking at “class sessions”, and seem to mean that a lecture course could still have lab work etc.
Similarly, in their definition of “active learning” its not clear whether the standard maths approach of two lectures and one tutorial a week counts or not.
Still, the results are pretty much as you would expect – the first rule of education is You Learn By Doing.
Well, I am bursting with comments since I am a glorified lecturer.
which method of instruction is the best way to impart both the knowledge and the learning and thinking skills we want students to acquire?
I do not know. But reasoning tells me that the best way should be to deliver the information WELL. I hear so often criticisms of the traditional lecture, and how we need to instead use ‘active learning’, or to ‘invert our class rooms’. But my point is that a damn good lecture that is delivered with passion, interjected with questions that require attention and answers, and some good jokes, is a fine way to hold attention and to get students to learn. That is an example of delivering the goods well.
I suppose that active learning and inverted classes can also do the task well. But I find that I like very much your point that these things are already a lot like how students interact, and that the traditional lecture and notetaking results in exercising important brain regions that do not get out that often.
As a student I enjoyed lectures for two reasons:
1. I could learn how to pronounce words I had read but couldn’t figure out how to utter.
2. I was greatly inspired when the instructor showed a strong interest in the subject. YES! I’d think…That’s why I love this subject. The perspiration and chalk dust were sexy.
Complicated answer.
I have taught high school and college and coached swimming at all levels.
Best advice: Knowing one’s audience, repetition, variety, and teach to the top.
Sad truth about teaching: it helps the teacher learn more than the students.
Just be a great role model…someone who illustrates to the students/athletes that the harder you push the happier life is.
Good comments, Kevin, and I agree with all you said (though I’ve never coached swimming…)
As for being a student, I generally really liked lectures, if the prof was any good at all. I needed to scribble notes like mad while listening,then often retyped them later so that they were reinforced – and legible. I’m not quite sure I’d get as much out of them if I were typing directly onto a computer
Well not everyone is a PCC. I suppose overall it would be better to watch a great lecture online than a dull one in person, but I’m sure a great lecture in person wins. The thing I fear is we’ll put average professors out of business. If we can eventually all access a Harvard, or M.I.T education online for less than it costs to attend your local university, what keeps them going. Do they become nothing more than research institutes competing for grant money?
I’m optimistic about progress; there is IMO generally always a better way to use human potential than rote repetition. So if a significant chunk of book-teaching becomes automated, what happens? The professors get more time to spend doing research, teaching lab technique, spending more time basically with students in the lab setting. That’s all good, IMO. Having a mentor when learning how to design and perform a good experiment is much better than having a mentor for learning how to solve for V in PV = nRT. So if Professors can spend less time doing the latter, they can spend more time doing the former, and that’s good for everyone.
For some reason, I learned best by listening to lectures. I never text books until I studied. If I had to read novels, etc. then I had to read them parallel to attending the lecture.
If I had to learn from other students, I wouldn’t do very well. I learn like an introvert and need time to digest things.
There is a huge amount of research in educational journals showing that studio classes, involving exercises and student participation in class, lead to greater learning gains (fraction of knowledge increased) on the part of students. Any amount of in-class student activity, such as Iclicker questions or short exercises of note-writing, will likely move the bar toward greater learning. Nothing is more deadly for the students than a 60 minute monologue. Just go to any seminar and see if you have a tendency to fall asleep yourself! A good teacher involves the students whenever possible.
I subjectively perceive that the boredom threshold of the student set has dropped significantly in the last generation or so. That surely is not the fault of the college lecturer. Nor is it her/his fault if students can’t discipline themselves to leave their gadgets alone in the lecture hall/classroom.
I remember one (mid-70’s) organic chemistry lecture where I was held rapt as the prof took a bit of a detour and held forth at length on how Wallace Carothers designed an elegant experiment to determine whether a given molecule were levo- or dextro- (if my terminology is correct), as chemically such a molecule and its mirror image are otherwise identical. (I’m sure I have the notes somewhere. A few years ago I took a stab at trying to find this description online. Will try again.)
I’m glad Prof. Dawkins made the video of the giraffe dissection where he traced the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve. But I could just as easily enjoy his holding forth on the matter in a lecture or a book.
I’ve read recently of high school students protesting in response to their system banning Snapchat in schools. Are they somehow being mistreated?
“There may be data backing Worthen’s argument, but I suspect not, or she would have adduced them.” You make a rather gratuitous assumption here.
I don’t think it’s gratuitous at all: if you have real data that back your claims on learning effectiveness, why leave it out? Worthen makes arguments based on her gut feelings, and that makes me suspicious. In fact, as other commenters have noted, a lot of data show that “active learning” does indeed produce superior results. Believe me, if you’re making an argument that one method works better than another, and there are data bearing on the issue, leaving them out doesn’t look good for your argument.
Over the past 8 years I’ve been a half-time student, taking both undergraduate and Masters level classes. Nearly all of these classes were delivered online as part of fully accredited degree programs. (If it matters, my GPA and academic honors show I’ve been rather successful as a student.)
Along the way I’ve tried to take a couple of non-credit MOOC courses and I’ve hated them. Both were offered through major universities. Because of the size of the classes, I have found it impossible to engage in any meaningful conversation. When there are 300 (or more) students posting to an online forum, conversation threads quickly shift focus and streams of thought disappear.
The MOOC model seems to rely on a sizable staff of technical and content assistants, with the instructor relegated to the role of being “the talent”. Pre-recorded lectures, no matter how well scripted, will generate questions. At least with an in-person lecture hall course there is a chance to ask real-time questions. Not so with the MOOCs that I have encountered. Even with an online class of 30, there are collaboration and presentation tools which make real-time instructor-student interactions possible.
Perhaps not all students find value in these kinds of interactions. This student finds them indispensable. Discussions with the instructor and exchanges with my peers help me test my comprehension and refine my thinking.
While I salute the grand experiment of the MOOC and I appreciate the online availability of materials presented by distinguished scholars, for me it fails as a method of deep learning.
The best way to learn almost anything is
1. Someone who knows a lot about it explains it to you for a bit.
2. You have a go at it yourself, with someone who knows a lot about it available to answer questions.
The difficulty is in working out the exact details of stages 1 and 2, and the balance between them.
In most cases the first bit is a presentation of some kind, e.g. a lecture, whereas the second bit varies massively between subjects (maths problems, essays, group discussions, performing experiments, defending yourself against someone who attacks you with a pointed stick).
Sometimes the two bits are mixed together a bit, e.g. I usually set exercises during lectures to help keep them awake.
The big problem with MOOCs is always going to be the “available to answer questions” bit of part 2, as noted in the comment above. Which is if course the same problem as we’ve always had when educating yourself purely from books.
A bureaucratic bunch which is called “The Office of Teaching Excellence” existed (I’m retired), and continues, at my institution. There is a good deal of quite justified cynicism concerning it, among those who actually teach subjects with content. Already the name, which should be ‘The Office of Excellent Teaching’, generates in me the sarcasm that at least we do not have an ‘office for teaching mediocrity’. Safe to say they issue an unending stream of publications by those who decry the lecture system, people who almost never have the least bit of real evidence for the ‘radical new’ teaching system they espouse. This is the opposite side of the coin to Coyne’s (can’t resist—really he’s Jerry) lack of evidence in the NYT article, which he correctly points out.
It seems pretty clear to everyone without an axe to grind that good teaching methods are a function of the subject, of the subject within the subject, of the teacher, and of each of the students. This is not a cry of despair, but at least it is a caution against the simplistic BS which emanates from ‘offices’ as above. They do serve as something to point to by (usually vastly overpaid) university administrators, when the latter are accused of too much emphasis on research. They serve at least one other narrowly useful service, namely to provide permanent jobs for 5 or 10 of those in the second category just ahead: If research is dubious, you teach; and if teaching is also, you ‘teach’ others how to teach (pardon the unoriginality, and that saying is of course only partly true!).
One other point, made also in responses above I think only by a few who did or do think highly of the lecture system: to quote from Jerry’s first few lines
“…college lectures (are) not nearly as “educational” as “active learning” experiences, in which students use computers or teach each other…”
(He wasn’t asserting or denying this.) Is there some rule that says using computers and teaching each other should only occur during lecture hours? Is it really foreign, to present day students, that they may well learn considerably more while an undergraduate (about the subjects of lectures as well as other things) from ‘busting their ass’ with and without the internet, and from all sorts of other people, especially fellow students, outside the lecture room. My very first lecture as an undergrad had two different rules of three. The relevant one here was that you must spend at least 2 of every 3 hours learning by your own efforts and interaction. (The other happened to be being told to look at the persons on the adjacent chairs—on average in the past only 1 of you 3 would graduate in this program—hopefully the other 2 would get some kind of ‘lesser’ degree. That probably came from a well evidenced experience with the wildly different values of recommendations from different secondary schools).
And finally, I am rather sympathetic to the article, as Jerry is. But one very dubious thing to me is her implication in several places that these ‘non-lecture techniques’ mostly emanate from the so-called STEM disciplines. I am not aware of this, and once again there is no evidence from her. I think most arguments that lectures are good when teaching not-so-scientific subjects are often just as good as arguments also for many parts of those STEM subjects.