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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! --
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.
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.
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.
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.
This may point to a measurement problem, but you're not forced into it. A desire to learn is all that is needed to master the subject even if the tests are not a reliable indicator of mastery, or are you attempting to say that the instructor is uninterested in teaching even to those who wish to learn?
If you're depending on others for your learning, well, you're doing it wrong.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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.
Ah, but is it possible to teach yourself?
You can't teach what you don't know, and if you already knew it you don't need to be taught it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
I am firmly of the opinion that the only person who can teach you is yourself. The point of lectures is not to teach you, it is to give you a guided tour of a part of your ignorance. It's then up to you whether you decide to remain happy with that ignorance or seek to dispel it. If you decide that you want to learn something, then other people can help you, but they can't force you to learn.
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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.
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.
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
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.
You're still in the front half of your classes. The amount of rote learning in the last two years should be much less. If not, you are in a crappy department or a crappy school, or have picked crappy instructors.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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."
Teachers, at the very least, show guideposts in unmapped territory. The best understand map is one which you fill in yourself.
n.b.It seems that regardless of what unmapped territory you have yet to discover, you are constantly bombarded daily with the next most logical piece of the puzzle (a simple consequence of reality). 'Teachers', in the academic sense, are less than necessary.
This makes me laugh most when hearing racists speak.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
The point of lectures is not to teach you, it is to give you a guided tour of a part of your ignorance.
I am stealing this and putting it on my syllabi from now forward. Thank you for the turn of phrase.
Rhapsody in Numbers
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.
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.
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."
Congratulations, you've fallen into the classic trap of being opinionated.
Not everyone can learn by reading and doing. Certain types of brain damage cause this - I have a Computer Science degree and have studied and been involved in game development, yet I'm unable to make my own game engine. Even though I've got all of this background training and knowledge, I'm basically unable to apply it without being shown how to do so in the first place. Simply knowing isn't enough.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to explain how this is so, as I lack the necessary qualifications and training in neuropsychology. The most I'm able to tell you is that:
a) it's to do with damage to the Corpus Callosum, and
b) most doctors (such as my own) and psychologists only consider the immediate symptoms rather than looking at the causes and other impacts, such as frequent burn-out, poor ability to understand written material, inability to read people (can't tell if someone's joking or not), and inability to apply learned information without having a demonstration of the application.
Here's the real bitch: I'm almost certainly smarter than you (very high I.Q., absolutely unable to apply it).
On the upside, for me at any rate, I've learned that this is the result of being assaulted as a child by a parent. As well as removing that parent from my life (until I can deal with that person without using my fists), I've read that the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" may be a good place to start, helping me to restructure my brain. Downside, it may be too late in life for me to do much about my career.
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?
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 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!
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.
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.
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 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!