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."

Comments

Study finds that topics requiring lecture...

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

...are 1.5 times harder than topics that can be easily turned in to fun activities and games. Voila!

Re:Study finds that topics requiring lecture...

[khchung]

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.

study finds dumbasses who can't pay attention...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:I've heard slashdot is behind the times...

[Hognoxious]

It's a method for transferring words from the prof's page to the student's without passing through the brain of either.

From The Front Lines...

[Dr_Ish]

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.

Prior Art

[eulernet]

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 !