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Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods."
...are 1.5 times harder than topics that can be easily turned in to fun activities and games. Voila!
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
are more likely to fail. so let us design our college curriculum around the retards who drink a 32 ounce mt. dew before class and can't shut off their phone less they miss a tweet. that will punish the people who actually can pay attention and maybe even enjoy the lecture for being smart. the ultimate policy would be that if a frat boy is bored he's allowed to punch a nerd in the arm. that will teach those fucking nerds to pay attention!
Seminars are better because the audience is supposed to ask questions and are regarded as peers, whereas lectures are by those at a higher level to those at a lower level.
Plus, cookies!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have completed 3 semesters of college so far and quite frankly most of the classes are a matter of memorization long enough to pass some test and the tests and final account for around 70% of the grade. The tests cover things the teachers do not always talk about, so they give us 'study guides' which is just the test itself without the answers.. So between that and google I memorize the answers and pass the test. The final is just random questions from the other tests.. The Labs usually count for around 30% of the grade, but typically if you do them at all you get a 100. This is not a way to learn... The teachers that write their own questions (that are qualified to do so) are the classes I learn a bit more from.
It is a lot easier for these teachers to use the premade questions from the book manufactures than make their own questions however...
But studies have been finding this for the past two decades.
I once heard it summarized as: The classroom lecture approach is the best method yet discovered for teaching people who can't read.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
+2 Informative
Prior to 1980, but after the 40's, education had gone the more "interactive" direction. But due to a disparity between educational performance between boys and girls, They switched to more lecture based teaching. The thought was that boys with their more dominant personalities interacted more while the girls "wallflowered" the labs and interactive portions of education. The NEA, feminists and other groups drove the Education dept to change teaching standards to make it more fair for Girls. The end product is yes, more girls in college (61% to 39%) but also a significantly lower percentage of boys in college, and higher dropout rates in certain areas due to a lack of interest. Also, since that point there has been a greatly increased "ADD" and "ADHD" diagnosis rate, since they boys are now expected to sit and listen for hours. This applies to all grade levels through soph/Jr college level ages.
People knew this before but political correctness drove the wrong diagnosis, damaged the ability for boys to get an education for over 30 years and has led to a decline in education for that same period. Instead of finding the right solution (one possibility, Segregation by gender and difference teaching methods) the NEA and cohorts hamstrung 1/2 the US population, and probably that policy was followed in other nations too.
Girls can handle themselves now and are less likely to be "put in the corner" by dominant and more aggressive personalities. Lets bring back more interactive education at ALL levels and give boys a chance again. And quick diagnosing bored boys as ADD because you havent been educated on how to teach anything but a docile girl class. Oh, and bring back punishments for bad behavior and let teachers control their classrooms.
My accounting teacher at UCSC would give us Sherberts, like you would have orange sherbert between a mulitple course meal to cleanse your palette. It was an unrelated quick discussion multiple times in a class and it worked well.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Clicking through links, the data said "55 percent more students fail lecture-based courses than classes with at least some active learning". I would call this 55% more likely or 1.5 times as likely, not 1.5 times more likely (which seems to imply 150% more likely).
So is that to say it's also the best method yet discovered *to* teach people to read?
are more likely to fail. so let us design our college curriculum around the retards who drink a 32 ounce mt. dew before class and can't shut off their phone less they miss a tweet. that will punish the people who actually can pay attention and maybe even enjoy the lecture for being smart. the ultimate policy would be that if a frat boy is bored he's allowed to punch a nerd in the arm. that will teach those fucking nerds to pay attention!
As a frat boy who has a CS degree I find this accurate. It's obviously why I picked CS because it had the highest frustration and nerd saturation. This resulted in more frustration but an easier time coping than any other major. Also that's not Mt. Dew it's Nati Lite! True story bro.
Studies show homework is ineffective, too. If the trend continues, education won't be deemed useful -- only learning while on the job will be deemed useful. Couple this with the fact that nobody wants to hire "green" people and the ecosystem of learning failure is complete.
Sounds to me like this is begging for something like "free structured internships". You don't pay money for school, but your employer doesn't pay you for your work. As long as there's some oversight ensuring interns aren't stuck with grunt work which doesn't facilitate learning it'd cost less for students, less for employers, and contribute to the workforce more directly.
no shit
But studies have been finding this for the past two decades.
My thoughts exactly. This is apparently a new study, however. It's not clear to me what is new about it other than, perhaps, translating the results into letter-grade equivalents. I like the quote: "it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data."
And yet, as you point out, this kind of data has been around for decades at least. I think they knew in the 80's if not earlier that knowledge retention is terrible for students listening to lectures compared to other methods (reading, group activities, teaching, etc). But how many professors took that data to heart? Is it a matter of couching it in different terms like letter grades? Probably not because those professors who lecture today either don't know or don't care. In either case they are immune to new studies like this.
As one of those "nerds" I still had issues with Lecture classes. My university combined Lecture with Recitation sections so that you could get a combo of learning styles (ie: Lecture MWF, Recitation TTh). Lecture's often put me to sleep, and when they didn't it was because the teacher would randomly go off on amusing tangents about the differing smells of white board markers or installing a new screen door the previous weekend. Recitation covered things like going over the homework and such, had smaller class sizes (taught by a TA instead of the professor), and helping people struggling with material.
It wasn't a perfect system, but it worked well enough. Some classes you just can't avoid the large lecture hall (like Engineering Physics or Calculus).
Teachers are.
More it's a symptom of the ADD generation and startlingly shrinking attention spans...
It's a method for transferring words from the prof's page to the student's without passing through the brain of either.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Although this study is good for grabbing headlines, the analysis seems a little bit shallow. For one thing, the focus is on STEM (Science, Technology, Mathematics and Engineering) disciplines, As someone who teaches at the college level in both a STEM field and a traditional humanities field, I am well aware that different areas require different methods. For instance, if one is teaching the basics of computational cognitive modeling, then some interactive segments are necessary. However, things work entriely differently if one is teaching, for instance, the history of the philosophy of mind. Another issue I have with the study is (as best I can tell -- I cannot access the original paper) that they do not control for lecturer effectiveness. To put it simply, we all know that some people are better at lecturing than others. That being said, even when teaching say, Cartesian Dualism, there are steps that can be taken to make lecture classes better. For instance, it is widely known that most humans have an attention span of between 10 to 20 minutes. So, it is simple enough to give everyone a break every twelve minutes, or so and tell a story, or some historical anecdote. Similarly, the Socratic approach, asking for input from students throughout the class and then encouraging discussion, can also make lectures much more effective and enjoyable. These are some of the things I do. That being said, I have known people who just drone on in a monotone, in lecture classes. Folks such as that can be utterly tedious. My point here is that unless the effectiveness of the teachers is taken into account, this study cannot be trusted.
Heaven forbid there are teachers out there who think they haven't achieved perfection and still strive to improve their effectiveness at knowledge transfer. At the university level, students must work hard to learn complex material and instructors equally hard to present it in the most effective manner. There are many examples of excellent students who don't even need a teacher and excellent instructors who could teach a third grader astrophysics, but in general there's a lot of room for improvement from both sides.
It used to be. Now, however, students don't take notes and expects handouts, and so that transfer can be made much more efficient by bypassing the lecture entirely and just letting them collect the handouts...
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Yeah, right? I mean, if you want kids to know something you just tell it to them and then if they don't know it it's their own damn fault. Really what are lecturers anyway but hacks who couldn't write their own books? Just put the textbook through a text-to-speach converter and play it for the lecture hall. Then you'll really separate out the bright kids (literally, the bright ones will just leave).
someone had told my Dad that.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
One reason lectures are so popular is that they are far, far easier for the instructor. Putting together a useful interactive activity is much harder than simply planning what to say. Even incorporating someone else's pre-designed activity is difficult to synchronize with one's own lesson plan. At the grade school level, I believe there is considerable room for improvement through teachers learning how to share and use activity plans.
At the college and graduate school level, it gets much harder on the professor as potential sources of planned activities thin out and specialization increases. Increasing interactivity demands much more time of these professors since most such improvements will have to be custom-designed for the class. Given the social structure of university compensation (research counts, teaching doesn't), I find it hard to see interactivity at the college or grad school level increasing very quickly.
That said, college and grad school courses are perhaps more interactive than they are given credit for. They often meet just a few times a week, reducing the boring lecture hours, and assign a lot of homework, increasing interactivity in a way that fails to appear in the studies cited.
For context, I am an adjunct professor (at the graduate school level). Based on this daily of studies I try to include some interactivity but it's really hard, so that mainly degenerates into a few intra-class status quizzes. My classes tend to meet for 2.5-3 hours per week, and have 5-20 hours of homework on top of that.
At one level, it's true (and long proven) that lectures have pedagogical limitations. But step back for a moment, and consider the lecture as a social event. It's the only time the course students gather en masse and actually see everyone else. It's a contact event - you meet old friends, make new ones, catch the mood of the group, swap study information, grouch about things. Take away the much-maligned lecture, and the college experience would be much the poorer.
I think it depends on a number of factors such as the one giving the lecture, the material covered by the lecture, the environment in which the lecture is given, and the one receiving the lecture.
I've had classes in the past that...well...the room was just not that comfortable to listen to a lecture (it was a 3hr class in a slightly overcrowded/warm room in the evening and it was a boring biology class; insta-sleep time).
I've also had classes where the lecturers (this particular class had 3 different professors; it was an American Studies/history class) all give lectures which were material to the class and were on the exams.
Oddly, I found the lectures interesting and was able to absorb the information better than my other classmates who took notes (I did not take notes and according to the professors, the first ever to do so and get a decent grade).
Then I've had classes where the hands-on part was more interesting such as physics with lasers (sadly, there were no sharks).
In essence, a YMMV situation.
We've known this since the 1950s. Reporting actually new results would be worthwhile don't you think? Or even "Its still true since educationalists discovered this in the 1950s:"
Appeals like this are appeals to work yourself like a dog for the boss. I see no reason to do so. The only reason to modify teaching techniques is to reduce your own labour input (while not letting the boss know this, of course) or increase your own enjoyment. If you "think of the kids" what you're really doing is increasing surplus value for your employer. Don't. The kids clearly come second behind yourself. Start treating them like that. Maybe you might even work out ways which significantly reduce your labour input AND which incidentally improve pedagogy.
You pay for the sausage: don't complain about watching it get made.
You lost me at "dumbasses who can't pay attention," because, if you find a topic boring, you must be a dumbass.
One of my calculus professors told us on the first day of class that note-taking was forbidden during his lectures. He argued that, in our quest to write down everything he said, we would inevitably miss important points or misunderstand key concepts. I was skeptical at first, but I soon discovered that he was absolutely right. I was able to absorb much more than I thought by listening intently to what he said, and fully focusing on what he drew on the board. In short, his lectures were effective and valuable.
I never took notes in any other class after that, and my grades never suffered from it. In most classes, the lecture materials were made available for later download anyway! Moreover, the freedom to simply pay attention actually made lectures more enjoyable.
The more you focus on what is being taught the more you will learn. Minds tend to wander when a lecture just drones on. Just the threat of being called on will increase the focus. But as I remember from my old school days the same children tend to put up their hands and get called. A way around this is to call students randomly.
A few years back, between research jobs, I did some time as a community college instructor. And preparing good lectures is hard. It's difficult to appreciate the amount of work that goes into a good lecture unless you've had to do it.
I used to like lectures: the old professor all covered in chalk had a great aesthetic appeal. But then I saw how much work it was.
And the thing is that the same lectures are being given all over the world. There I was - giving a bunch of introductory biology lectures. But a bunch of other instructors also at that college were giving essentially the same lectures. And then all over the country other instructors were pouring huge amounts of work into preparing and giving the same sets of lectures.
Back during the, rather lengthy, Iraq war, the USA was spending a billion dollars every few days. And there are plenty of financial guys who could easily afford to pay billions (more) in taxes. Maybe their mistresses will have to make do with a few less designer handbags. And maybe they won't have quite as much incentive to bring the world financial system to its knees (again). In the grand scheme of the US budget, a few billion dollars really isn't that much.
But imagine if the USA poured a few billion dollars into some some really good educational videos. Get the top in-person lecturers and make really good animations - even go ahead and make them interactive for classroom use. And the key point would be to release them into the public domain (e.g. ditch the model where some commercial publisher retains copyright and charges for each incremental copy).
With those kinds of resources, you could provide a much more effective and efficient education than all this re-inventing the wheel where everyone separately prepares and delivers essentially the same lectures. There are a huge number of real problems in the world that desperately need solving: poverty, disease, conflict. And education is a key piece of the solution.
So education very is important. But we're stuck with a bunch of inefficient traditions that just don't leverage modern technology.
Most lectures I've been to were lectures because it's practically one of the very few ways one professor can address hundreds of people, of course with smaller groups you could do more but then you need lots of assistants and there are study groups that are essentially students learning on their own. Their main purpose is because having regularly scheduled events drags the undisciplined through the curriculum and because socially it doesn't feel like you've been stuck with your nose in a book all day. Personally I felt the most productive way was just crunching through the book until it made sense, but I think that's very individual.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It seems like part of schools are like that at least the trade schools got that right more hands on work and less lecture time.
for ultimate efficiency we should just let students pay for the diploma directly, bypassing this archaic system of 'grades, 'studying' and worst of all 'effort'. In the end it's all useless, and only used for gaming interviewers and HR 'professionals'.
for-profit universities are of course approaching this ideal, but a lingering attachment to ~800 years of university level education are still holding them back :(
Unless you can have a controlled study where both groups take the same exams and have the same labs/assignments the "result" is meaningless.
My most memorable classes were not lectures. The purpose of textbooks and assigned reading was to transfer the fundamental information. Homework from the textbook gave you an opportunity to gauge whether or not you were actually learning the material and your ability to apply the processes described by the text. Classrooms were a place to first have a pop quiz (a great way to really gauge if you have retained and/or truly comprehend what you have been learning), then to discuss the reading assignment (Socratic method), and if applicable, engage in a demonstration or skill-building activity.
I've attended hundreds of hours of classes, and I've taught graduate courses in engineering. If your lecture has an introduction, preferably with a motivational topic, followed by an outline, a thorough discussion that includes examples for each concept, and then a summary, your students will learn more than if they did not show up and just read the notes.
Of course you need to engage them, ask them questions (I find ways to get them to contribute by offering homework points (capped) for interaction), but that's part of preparing a good lecture. I think most of the lectures that are criticized are those prepared by teachers that would rather do something else.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
It used to be. Now, however, students don't take notes and expects handouts, and so that transfer can be made much more efficient by bypassing the lecture entirely and just letting them collect the handouts...
Handouts don't work. They aren't a substitute for lectures, nor do they adequately convey "knowledge". Nor does it have anything to do with ADD or short attention spans. Cognitive psych studies have shown that the average brain begins to wander after about 10-12 minutes of being lectured at, so that's the maximum amount of time one should ever lecture without a break. We've known this at least since the 1980s. Active learning has been shown to work for several decades now. This study quantifies the difference it makes. It is a shame that (a) most colleges don't teach graduate students and faculty effective teaching methods, and (b) its been decades and there's still way too much lecturing going on in college classes.
Study finds that uninterested teachers are more likely to both give only lectures and more likely to have students fail.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In 230BC, Xun Zi wrote:
"What I hear, I forget. What I say, I remember. What I do, I understand."
or:
"Tell me and I will forget. Show me and I will remember. Involve me and I will understand."
Nothing changed !
So to answer your concerns I tracked down the publication in PNAS: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
To quote from the article:
The data we analyzed came from two types of studies: (i) randomized trials, where each student was randomly placed in a treatment; and (ii) quasirandom designs where students self-sorted into classes, blind to the treatment at the time of registering for the class
In other words, if I understand the article correctly, the authors only considered studies where active learning was contrasted with traditional lectures in the same course! Therefore it seems likely that active learning is a good idea, regardless of whether the topic is hard or easy. (By the way, active learning doesn't necessarily have to involve fun and games, although if a student, in general, doesn't think that learning is fun, perhaps he or she should consider doing something else...)
(One possible reason why lectures are still so common: It is a cheap teaching method that scales well with class size.)
If you read the article in PNAS ( http://www.pnas.org/content/ea... ) you can see that they consider the question of examination equivalence by only looking at previous studies that "were largely or solely limited to changes in the conduct of the regularly scheduled class or recitation sessions;" So based on what I have read in the paper I would classify this as very far from junk science.
Except there is research going back before this generation, and evidence of such things going a lot further back. In addition to some of the basic ideas behind making teaching more effective, a lot of research also finds that a big hindrance consists of teachers and professors set in their way, that they insist things are done a way because they always have been and won't listen to possible changes. When you find someone who says their teaching has been fine, it is the students who aren't, then you should be getting concerned. Not that students don't don't change over time.
Learning is a two way street. Putting everything onto the lectures is counterproductive to say the least. Nowadays, we have students holding unrealistic expectations that course material could be and should be completely understandable by simply going to the lectures, with minimal, if at all, work afterwards. Putting so called activities into the lecture serves the most obvious function, to slow it down. This should become quite clear when we compare what we are teaching with what was taught in the 70s.
Seriously, if you even remotely think whatever you are learning is worth the time and money spent on it ---- not the piece of paper you get to show people with ---- you would want to spend you own time getting things together before stepping into a lecture. If a lecture is full of such students, it would be run in a completely different way ---- and boring is going to be the last word ever to describe it.
Another fake argument is about interests. It's not the lecture is not interesting, it's the kids that has their interests in other places. They are fed with "follow your interest and passion, then you'll succeed", but are never told that interests are like plants, if not nurtured properly, it won't bear any fruit. All that nurturing is hard work, and it takes a while to realize what plant is suitable for the soil ---- until then, it might seem all work is wasted. Kids have the wrong idea of efforts leads to results. It needs to be hammered into them that efforts of the right sort leads to results ---- but they never get to understand it in the context of academics.
Yes, professional teachers have known this for decades going back further than the scope of this study (go back to John Dewey or Plato if you like), and most professional teachers typically don't just lecture, they include a whole range of learning activities to facilitate learning. The problem is, there aren't that many professional teachers in universities. Universities hire professional researchers who do teaching on the side. Want a job? Want tenure? See how far being a good teacher gets you. It's more of a bonus than a requirement. Not surprisingly, university teaching staff tend to reflect these values.
I chuckle at the title, Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds
Just ask all those Mathematicians and Physicists considering lectures are the only form of classroom instruction as it involves breakdown of problems/past experiences from previous works. And considering a lot of the innovations use today originated from these guys says a lot.
Lectures are just a tool in the arsenal, it could be a poor performing teacher as well (one more interested in his research or tenure), putting finals at the same date, or have a critical paper due the day after thanksgiving. I recall a lot of the lectures I've been in fell in 2 camps, ones that were engaging and ones that just plain showed the teacher reading a text book. A lot of hands on stuff I don't recall anymore, the tech as changed as well, but at least lectures I can still refer to the notes and written examples. Both are good techniques of instruction, but should be used in the right context.
More people learn by doing than listening. I teach for a living, and even I can't stand myself talking for more than 15 minutes. I need to ask questions, provoke dialog, give a small demonstration, or better yet, a small hands-on exercise.
Listening to someone talk, just talk, is often like listening to a textbook. zzzzzzzzz
Shake it up people. Just because straight "I talk, you listen" lecture is how you earned your degree does not mean it is an effective means to communicate information and develop understanding.
It is a shame that (a) most colleges don't teach graduate students and faculty effective teaching methods, and (b) its been decades and there's still way too much lecturing going on in college classes.
And, I would say that there is a trend to making this worse. It used to be that a student would get three to four lectures per week in a subject, spread out over as many days. Each of these lectures was about 50 minutes long. Now, most courses are taught with two lectures per week, each about one and a half hours long; I am certain that this is being done in the name of efficiency and "cost cutting". But, as you point out, most students have had their attention wander after 10-12 minutes. Given this, it should be no surprise that much of the class has mentally disengaged from the lecture long before the professor has reached the end of the day's lesson. Is it really any wonder that students come through to the end of the semester having retained almost nothing of the material? Of course, active learning works better but it requires some motrivation on the part of the student. As for the teaching methods of graduate student and faculty, nothing will change there until they are rewarded for putting in the effort to teach effectively. For them the mantra is "publish or perish". That needs to change too.
I cannot tell you how much I thank questions. All of them, even the dumbest.
I do try to be very clear and dynamic, but some topics... are just hard to grasp, or I have not found the proper way to teach them... But in some subjects, most students won't even realize they are not getting what I teach. There are a few students who are burnt with questions, and cannot stand on a point they don't understand. Some students insist on their questions even if they are sometimes just too easy.
I thank them. And I try to explain, over and over, from different angles. That's what brings back the attention of the rest of the class, and the different angles are in the end good for all of them.
In my second year I had two critical courses success in which was pivotal in my getting into med school. One was an advanced calculus class where the 78 yr old prof droned incomprehensibly into the blackboard as he scrawled equations. The other was organic chemistry. That prof used the lecture opportunity to scribble onto an acetate and mumble at the 300 desperate pre-med students trying to hang onto her every word.
I thought both experiences were insane at the time and after 32 years my opinion remains unchanged.
What about for those students who won't read?
The article is not discussing something like theoretical physics, it's discussing things like Calculus 1 and English Comp. These are prerequisite for learning other subjects. Actually it's pretty generalized and claims "STEM", nothing is mentioned about master or doctorate level classes.
So lets go in two different directions here. First, requirements are not necessarily exiting because they require work to learn. In a culture that equates a web searched answer for wisdom and celebrates idiocy (watch some normal TV programming) it's not hard to see why! Learning basic concepts is done by lecture and dialogue. Trig is not going to be "fun" when it comes down to memorizing. You won't be teaching the "fun" stuff without the basic knowledge. Lectures explain the concepts so that people can use the knowledge they are getting "now" later in education. That is what Wisdom built from.
The other direction to go to consider why everything has to be fun, exciting, or a game. It does not, life is full of good and bad things. Want to set yourself up to fail, imagine a world full of rainbows where the turds taste like candy and everything always works the first time. Again, this is a culture issue where people are not shown the real world. As with above, look at our entertainment industry. When academia attempts to pander the same thought processes as "entertainment" does, we end up with a whole lot of disappointed/depressed people. We could be teaching people that failures happen, and are how we get better. Learning from mistakes is normal and we should be happy when we learn from a failure. Instead we reward everyone all the time, even the people that quit the race or get answers wrong (not so much a college issue with that, but that is the foundation laid out for students in K-12).
Basically this is a cultural issue no matter how it's sliced. Not meant as an attack, but you seem to be fitting right in to the culture (I could have misinterpreted). Who cares if you don't like in the real world? Nobody makes you take a college class. Society is, and needs to be, made up of people with specialized knowledge in many subjects. Nobody can master everything.
A final point is that I have had boring lectures, but that has nothing to do with the class being lecture based. It would be because the the professor was not a good communicator, or that I was either bored or overwhelmed with the knowledge. In either case, I was always provided additional resources if I needed them so I learned.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Probably not because those professors who lecture today either don't know or don't care.
College is kind of a half-way point between being spoon-fed in elementary school and the real world, where no knowledge is given to you (you have to research it yourself). In college, you have a person in front of the class because they have a lot of knowledge. They might not be the best teachers, but it is your job as a student to get the knowledge from the professor, and they will try to share with you.
Then you get to the real world and you're lucky if you even have documentation. As a student, it will help you in life to improve your ability to learn from lectures, and other non-gamified means.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I found it easy to convert my boring 40 minute lectures into 11 minute lectures, much better, more digestible, and leaving me time to interact with students instead of lecturing to them. --Jon Claerbout
I think you will find they are called "burger flippers" rather then "students"
80's? What about the 60's and 70's when degrees weren't used to rule out qualified workers just to get cheaper H1B workers? The degree mills have devalued their product, and thus it is entrance exams that are employed since final exams don't mean squat. The truly thirsty for knowledge have always learned themselves, look at Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Feynman, etc. Today degrees have become merely a means to ensure the poor can't compete. The Internet has arrived, and with it brought technologies that make the old systems of centralized knowledge dissemination obsolete. Colleges should never have been allowed to become the gate keepers for employment, the ROI is terrible and the new generation of the Information Age is not impressed. The accreditation bubble is about to pop.
Forget the foolish students: It's such a waste to require your top researchers to repeatedly lecture when they could be doing science while a youtube video replaces them; Videos are consumable at leisure, rewindable and thus easy to take notes against. Instead of lectures the professors could actually be doing something useful, if not research then interacting directly with students that have questions about how to solve example problems posed -- Actually Teaching pupils before testing them. Ah, but you see, a failed student has to PAY for another semester. Any elementary economist can see the system for what it is.
It is a cheap teaching method that is consistently poor regardless of class size. FTFY
TheI understand words much better when they go in my eyes rather than my ears.
Despite this, I've had much better results in classes that are tough for me by taking good notes in lectures. Your mind wanders much less because you're already multitasking; your retention is better because both tasks are over the same information. Paraphrasing somebody else's words requires understanding; when you can't keep up, it's a sign you should ask for a clarification.
I often didn't even really study the notes; there was no need, since the act of taking them was how I learned. When I did need more in-depth info, I could just look in the textbook, as whenever I jotted something down from the lecture, I'd correlate it with the page in the book we were on.
For tough subjects, this method really isn't optional. There's no good reason we aren't teaching everyone to do it.
Oh, god dammit I hate the mobile site. That is not what my post looked like when I pushed the button.
The first part should read as follows. "The solution here isn't less lecturing, it's teaching people what notes are actually for and how to properly take them. I would generally be considered a 'visual learner...'"
Why the hell can't somebody make a droid app with posting functionality that isn't even more broken than m.slashdot.org?
Holy shit, Time Cube Guy is back!
There's a big-huge-enormous difference between teaching "students" something because they want to graduate and teaching Students something because they care to know.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that lectures are a fantastic method of exchanging information (i.e. teaching) between two persons (i.e. professor and student) who are passionate about the subject-matter. That used to be why people went to university. It isn't anymore. But it one-day will be again.
If you are finding lectures boring, you've likely chosen the wrong major. If you find them boring regardless of field, you're likely a dumbass.
If the moment something bores you, you can't deal with it, yes, you're a useless dumbass.
Not everything in life is a party and you'll have to deal with it on a regular basis. May as well start in school.
Valuable as this research may be, it is hardly breaking new ground. Students have complained about unengaging teachers ever since teaching classes was introduced. I don't think this means that the lecture form is suddenly wrong as a means for delivering - it just means that teachers, as always, should learn how to deliver good lectures, and students should learn how to get the best out of a lecture.
A good lecture is one that explains or highlights the things that are not covered well in the text book; it shouldn't be detailed, unless there is a particular detail that is missing in the book. A good lecture gives background, motivation and context, so the student then goes away and reads the text with greater insight. The language should as plain as possible without abandoning the necessary technicalities, because plain language is easier to understand, and students are beginners in this subject.
A good student, on the other hand, asks questions. Again and again and again. The only stupid question is the one that isn't asked.
LOL, I give lectures on the ineffectiveness of studies. Who would have thought....
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Mine leckturez in Angliss wer vary boreing!
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You said MY program's a spyware?
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Now: Is YOUR SOURCE Computer Associates REPUTABLE? See here http://www.bing.com/search?q=c...
---
"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You say my program's crapware?
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---
"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.
You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.
APK
P.S.=> You FAIL, sockpuppeteer troll...
... apk
"Your hosts file app is SPYWARE, dude." - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @02:43AM (#46702387) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You said MY program's a spyware?
Ok: CONTRARY PROOF from a REPUTABLE security community source http://slashdot.org/comments.p... who hosts my app (malwarebytes hpHosts) which you are FREE TO VERIFY by email if you like as MY proof!
Now: Is YOUR SOURCE Computer Associates REPUTABLE? See here http://www.bing.com/search?q=c...
---
"for a crapware host files app that nobody in his right mind wants to allow anywhere close to his system" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Wednesday April 16, 2014 @12:24PM (#46769393) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
You say my program's crapware?
Disprove 17 points here showing hosts give uses more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity then since YOu say my program's "crapware" http://start64.com/index.php?o...
---
"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Show us a post where I put up material on hosts where it doesn't apply.
You can't, can you? Nope - That makes YOU a liar.
APK
P.S.=> You FAIL, sockpuppeteer troll...
... apk
If you've reached the level of education where lectures are the standard teaching method, it is expected that you should be able to pay attention, and not have to be baby-sat through your education anymore.
What about for those students who won't read?
There's another good old quip to the effect that people who don't read have no advantage over people who can't read.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Lectures aren't the problem. Exams are the problem.
I found it much easier to engage with lectures after I finished my degree and had the freedom to learn things without the pressure of being asked arbitrary questions later in the year. Not just random subjects outside my field which suddenly became interesting, but I found I wanted to learn more about things that I touched on in the degree, but couldn't go deeper. As a physicist this is pretty much every subject I was taught.
It also depends a lot on the lecturer, of course we know that if the guy reads off the slides there's no point turning up. We weren't registered in our university (how archaic) so no problem ducking a lecture and still taking (and indeed aceing) the exam.
Finally what's the chance of failing? Is it 1/1000? So does a 1/1500 chance make much difference? If it was 1/2 then maybe I'd start worrying, but frankly the failure grade is so low these days (around 30-40%) that virtually no one fails. On my course, physics so not a 'soft' course, only one person actually failed. A few people had to drop off the Masters program, but they still left with degrees. There's going to be bias: physics has high entry requirements so you'd expect less to drop out and by the time you get to fourth year the average grade is around 67.5% where 70% is a 1st class degree.
My perspective:
I teach math at a community college. Although I teach some higher level classes, my schedule is filled mostly with College Algebra.
I lecture almost exclusively. In an ideal world, I would do more engagement activities. However, let me dose you with a little reality: We have to cover a lot of material. In my opinion, College Algebra is one of the toughest math classes one can take in College, which puts it pretty high on the list of difficulty overall. I say this as someone with a Ph.D. in Mathematics (that's "real" Math, by the way, not Math Ed).
Part of that is the level of readiness of the average student, but if you look at what we cover, its an amazingly large amount of material that is almost completely devoid tof real-world problems the students (who mostly are not math enthusiasts!) can digest along the way. Every section jumps from one topic to another, with very little overlap (except in the sense that you need to know all of the previous material to get to the next bit of material).
Anyway: While I would like to plan more activities for the students that would engage them more easily, time is so short. This Spring, we had one or two cancellations due to weather, and it was all I could do to shorten/condense the material to get done with what I needed to. In a history class, instead of lecturing, I could assign them the material to read. In Math (at this level) that idea is laughable. These students struggle so much with the topic...and let's be clear, that is a problem too. This is the stuff I was doing in my Math classes when I was 4 years younger than them (and acing it!). What they need to do is see lots of examples and practice a lot of problems. That's the only way. Anything else I do in class I can't help but think of as a waste of time, with the end result being that there would be one more difficult (and different) problem that they would have to learn how to do on their own.
Thoughts?
This is true of *every* teaching method. All of them are useful. All have relative strengths and weaknesses. All of them lose effectiveness through over-use. There is no Right Way to do this. There is no silver bullet. A good teacher knows how to mix things up.
Most college lecturers would tell you the same thing. Lecture is used because its strength is efficiency. Arranging interactive activities for 50 or 100 or 200 students is wildly impractical and inefficient, as would be repeating the lecture many times for smaller groups. That's why we have labs and recitations and study groups. Any worthwhile professor will tell you lectures are important for information transfer, but those other things are critical for learning to occur through application and exploration.
I was a math educator back in the late 90s when the cool new thing was, "everything is group exploration." There were some real benefits to that. But it got just as tiresome for the students as lecture ever did. And the actual effect on outcomes was questionable at best. So we went away from it. Now I'm hearing it's the cool new thing again. And so it goes.
I love education and educators, but it's a cardinal example of Feynman's "cargo cult" science. We cyclically chase the same rabbits down the same holes, acting like we invented it each time. We blindly implement approaches used elsewhere without understanding why (or even if) they really work. That's why many older teachers are resistant to change. It's not because they're lazy; it's because they've seen it before.
Also, FWIW, you can put me firmly in the camp of those who resist the notion that education must always entertain to be effective, and that every topic taught must have a direct foreseeable relationship to a job skill. "Relevance" is the cry of those who hate knowledge and those who pursue it, and who want to live sheltered lives in their own little silos of interest. There is a difference between education and training.
Learning to pay attention, take notes, and recall oral information is a skill to be learned and mastered just as much as the content of the lecture.
So we have a battle of memes in the wild. The "Lecture" meme and the "Studies" meme are fighting it out...
One of my favorite professors employed the use of the "Moore Method" in our higher level mathematics courses, he referred to it as the "Houston Method". The main drawback of these "active learning methods" is the amount of material covered is considerably less compared to traditional methods. This is fine for upper level courses, but unacceptable (imho) for lower level material.
I know a burger flipper who is quite possibly the smartest man I know. He's taught me about Kants Transcendental Unity of Apperception and Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious.
I guess I need to read through the studies some more, but I believe that most/many indicators of education show that lecturing is poor (relative to other methods) regardless of the particular talents of the students. Yes, I have felt that I've gotten a lot out of certain lectures. Some lecturers are definitely better than others. Certainly both student and professor abilities can make a huge difference, but on top of that a professor can still do better by adopting a hybrid approach.
Lecture for a bit (less than 10 minutes, maybe 15 tops), then switch it up. Have students work a problem (maybe in pairs) and vote on a solution. With smallish classes you can use simple voting methods, and with 100+ groups you can use electronic voting. Have short, focused discussions. Do a demonstration that includes volunteers. Have students research related topics and present their own mini-lecture (small classes only). And so on. Even if the professor is a great lecturer and the students are all highly disciplined and auditory-sequential learners (almost never true for an entire class), they would *still* benefit more from this kind of approach. It certainly takes more work on the part of the professor and involves some retraining, but students are paying a lot of money for their education and they ought to be treated as valued customers a little bit more. I've tried these approaches myself in undergraduate physics classes of various levels from gen-ed courses to the introductory sequence and up to the jr/sr level. I won't claim to have mastered anything but it quickly became obvious to me that lecturing for an hour is never the best way to teach. There are alternatives and a conscientious professor owes it to their students to pay some heed to the learning sciences and experiment with different approaches. It's not a one-technique-fits-all kind of thing, but anyone can improve upon pure lecturing.
I heard of one professor that met a student wandering the halls at the end of the semester, looking for their professor. He asked him where this certain professor's office was -- they were preparing for the final exam and had some questions. He said "I'm your professor. Have you seen me before?" Obviously this student didn't feel that the lectures were an efficient way for them to learn.
News to me. After all, they're a kind of scaled down version of a thing called books, which generally do convey knowledge and have done for hundreds of years.
However I'll concede that this is contingent on actually reading the darn things.
Maybe it's different for reading versus listening, but when I did my O levels we were told to break every 30 minutes.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
A bit like a couple of Luchadore.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!