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Lecture classes are bad. They’re impersonal, low-attendance activities in which neither the students nor the professors are invested. And students don’t learn much.
Probably more activity would improve this. According to a piece by Rosanne Skirble at Voice of America:
Researchers focused on two large introductory physics classes at the University of British Columbia in Canada which had more than 250 students in each section. Both classes were held in a theater-style room with fixed seats.
For one week, the control group was taught in the traditional lecture style by a well-rated, experienced instructor. However, in the experimental group, the more inexperienced instructor did not lecture. Instead, students were divided into groups of two or three to discuss and answer a series of questions, projected on a large screen.
The group that experimenters broke up into discussion sections did better, a lot better. According to the article “in a test of the material immediately following the experiment, students in the interactive class scored twice as high as those in the control section.”
This isn’t much of a surprise. We’ve known for years that large passive lecture-style courses don’t work that well.
The problem is that those courses are so cheap and easy to administer. It’s very tempting for colleges to try and pack hundreds of students into these courses. They pay the same amount whether they take small expensive courses or large cheap ones.
And if students don’t do well in these courses (and they don’t), well no problem. No one blames the school; it’s the students who didn’t study hard enough. Right?
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Texas Aggie on May 14, 2011 12:58 AM:
In the medical school system there is (was?) a plan called case based learning. In it the students learn their basic biological sciences sort of "by the way" in that they have to learn them to understand the particular cases that they are studying. Much of their learning is on their own. At the very end, the two types, traditional and case based, have similar academic results, but the case based learners are much happier and better adjusted than the traditional students, and they have the experience already of knowing how to deal with a real case.
The same thing applies here in that at least the initial understanding is better because the students had to develop it themselves. Notice that the comparison is made on the basis of exams given right after class. I wonder how the two systems compare further down the line when the traditional students have had the opportunity to assimilate the information they were given in class. Because, as the people who have gone through the system know, you have to study and think about the subject after class before you can understand it.