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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."
...but I liked lectures...
Learning from someone who knows their subject much better than I do who has taken the time to condense a part of their knowledge into a well structured lecture is the thing I miss most when comparing university to work.
I wish to remain anomalous
More it's a symptom of the ADD generation and startlingly shrinking attention spans...
Because we all know that the one single purpose of an education is to train you for a job in the capitalist hell of the labour market. Critical thinking, political activism, creativity, and cultural development and experimentation are all excluded in the Educate Me For A Job model. Of course, the defunding of universities in the USA has caused their costs to go vertical - benefiting the vectoral class of financial extraction via student loans, precluding people from becoming activists, because if they get busted or booted they're stuck with a jillion dollar debt and no degree. Of course, the money for schools has been poured into prisons and warfare, where, again, it benefits the rich, and not much else. So, yeah, get a degree. Get a job. Be a useless debt slave cog in the machine.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
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 !
I will offer the caveat of things like theoretical physics, which have no useful application
I will offer this quote from Particle Fever by Kaplan: "When radio waves were discovered, they weren't called radio waves, because there was no radio at that time."
When the electron was discovered, it was called "the most useless particle".
Quantum Mechanics give the basis of building up semiconductors.
Yeah, right, no useful application.
Oliver.