Apr 13, 2018 03:02 AM
(This post was last modified: Apr 13, 2018 03:03 AM by C C.)
http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-against-lectures
EXCERPT: Getting “lectured” is rarely, if ever, a pleasant experience. You’re being told what to do and think, or even chastised. Don’t lecture me, we like to say. Having to “attend” a lecture, though—that’s not so bad, depending on the speaker. Hell, on the go, I listen to lectures willingly. Check out “A Master List of 1,300 Free Courses From Top Universities: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures,” from Open Culture. It’s a treasure trove. Yet the efficacy of the lecture, as a teaching method, is in doubt. The latest salvo comes from a study published in Science last month, authored by just under 30 researchers who, a decade ago, began monitoring almost 550 lecturers as they taught over 700 courses at 25 universities in Canada and the United States.
[...] The researchers of the Science study close by saying that, in effect, it shouldn’t be too much to expect fields that prize empirical evidence to go where the evidence points. “These findings challenge institutions and STEM disciplines to reflect on practices and policies that sustain the status quo,” they write. “Specifically, institutions should revise their tenure, promotion, and merit-recognition policies to incentivize and reward” faculty, of “all academic ranks,” to implement ways of instructing students that have been shown to work. Some fields are less lecture-heavy than others. “Relative to chance,” they found, “mathematics and geology have more student-centered styles than expected, biology has more interactive”—clicker-grounded—“styles than expected, and chemistry has more didactic styles than expected.”
MORE: http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-against-lectures
EXCERPT: Getting “lectured” is rarely, if ever, a pleasant experience. You’re being told what to do and think, or even chastised. Don’t lecture me, we like to say. Having to “attend” a lecture, though—that’s not so bad, depending on the speaker. Hell, on the go, I listen to lectures willingly. Check out “A Master List of 1,300 Free Courses From Top Universities: 45,000 Hours of Audio/Video Lectures,” from Open Culture. It’s a treasure trove. Yet the efficacy of the lecture, as a teaching method, is in doubt. The latest salvo comes from a study published in Science last month, authored by just under 30 researchers who, a decade ago, began monitoring almost 550 lecturers as they taught over 700 courses at 25 universities in Canada and the United States.
[...] The researchers of the Science study close by saying that, in effect, it shouldn’t be too much to expect fields that prize empirical evidence to go where the evidence points. “These findings challenge institutions and STEM disciplines to reflect on practices and policies that sustain the status quo,” they write. “Specifically, institutions should revise their tenure, promotion, and merit-recognition policies to incentivize and reward” faculty, of “all academic ranks,” to implement ways of instructing students that have been shown to work. Some fields are less lecture-heavy than others. “Relative to chance,” they found, “mathematics and geology have more student-centered styles than expected, biology has more interactive”—clicker-grounded—“styles than expected, and chemistry has more didactic styles than expected.”
MORE: http://nautil.us/blog/the-case-against-lectures