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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!
...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
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.
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.
That's nice and all, but you still have a hard-wired limit to your attention span.
It's pretty much standard in teachers' education (at least in Germany) that you have to "switch gears" from time to time or you may as well rhapsodize about the colour blue - nobody will be really listening after a while.
It doesn't mean that lectures don't work. It just means that only doing lectures is not as effective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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...)
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.
...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.
Agreed. This difference is almost like the difference between people who read, and those who don't.
People who don't read will tell you how much more effective a movie can tell a story, blah, blah, compared to books. Books are boring. They can't stay focused on boring text. etc. etc.
People who read find books interesting and enjoy good reading.
If you do a study on the "effectiveness", by whatever measure, of books vs movie, the result will be skewed by those who don't read.
Oliver.
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."
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.