How Students View the Teacher Lecture

This week’s article summary Lessons in Learning--a follow-up to last week’s summary Why Does Teacher Talk Still Dominate the Classroom—focuses on Harvard research about students believing that teacher lecture is the most effective classroom pedagogy for learning.

However, once students are presented with empirical evidence that they actually learn more through self-discovery (even with new concepts), they then are more open to it versus traditional lectures.

So while last week’s article focused on why teachers often fall back on lecturing, this week’s recommends that teachers need to help students see the long-term benefits of them actively learning (and grappling) with ideas and concepts.

As both these article show, teacher and student perceptions of the effectiveness of lecturing persists and both need to better understand that while active learning often seems inefficient and time-consuming, it actually supports deeper and lasting learning.

It’s a little like how learned the rules of grammar. As a student, I listened in class, dutifully completed my grammar homework assignments, and managed to pass quizzes and tests, but I never really truly understood the rules and lexicon of grammar, mechanics, and usage; it was more like isolated bits of information rather than a unified whole. But when I began teaching English, I felt the responsibility of truly knowing the what and why of grammar. As a student, grammar never stuck, but when I actively led myself and got perplexed by all those weird rules, exceptions, and inconsistencies, it finally clicked. I don’t know how important it is to know that a predicate nominative is why we should say “It is I”, not “It is me”, but by gosh, I know the reason why!

Joe

For decades, there has been evidence that classroom techniques designed to get students to participate in the learning process produce better educational outcomes at virtually all levels.

And a new Harvard study suggests it may be important to let students know it.

The study shows that, though students felt as if they learned more through traditional lectures, they actually learned more when taking part in classrooms that employed so-called active-learning strategies.

Lead author Louis Deslauriers knew that students would learn more from active learning. He published a key study in Science in 2011 that showed just that. But many students and faculty remained hesitant to switch to it.

“Often, students seemed genuinely to prefer smooth-as-silk traditional lectures,” Deslauriers said. “We wanted to take them at their word. Perhaps they actually felt like they learned more from lectures than they did from active learning.”

The question of whether students’ perceptions of their learning matches with how well they’re actually learning is particularly important, Deslauriers said, because while students eventually see the value of active learning, initially it can feel frustrating.

“Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning,” he said. “On the other hand, a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are.”

To understand that dichotomy, Deslauriers designed an experiment that would expose students in an introductory physics class to both traditional lectures and active learning.

For the first 11 weeks of the 15-week class, students were taught using standard methods by an experienced instructor. In the 12th week, half the class was randomly assigned to a classroom that used active learning, while the other half attended highly polished lectures. In a subsequent class, the two groups were reversed.

Following each class, students were surveyed on how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I feel like I learned a lot from this lecture” and “I wish all my physics courses were taught this way.” Students were also tested on how much they learned in the class with 12 multiple-choice questions.

When the results were tallied, the authors found that students felt as if they learned more from the lectures, but in fact scored higher on tests following the active learning sessions. “Actual learning and feeling of learning were strongly anticorrelated,” Deslauriers said.

This shouldn’t be interpreted as suggesting students dislike active learning. In fact, many studies have shown students quickly warm to the idea, once they begin to see the results. “In all the courses at Harvard that we’ve transformed to active learning,” Deslauriers said, “the overall course evaluations went up.”

“It can be tempting to engage the class simply by folding lectures into a compelling ‘story,’ especially when that’s what students seem to like. I show my students the data from this study on the first day of class to help them appreciate the importance of their own involvement in active learning.”

Ultimately, Deslauriers said, the study shows that it’s important to ensure that neither instructors nor students are fooled into thinking that lectures are the best learning option. “Students might give fabulous evaluations to an amazing lecturer based on this feeling of learning, even though their actual learning isn’t optimal,” he said. “This could help to explain why study after study shows that student evaluations seem to be completely uncorrelated with actual learning.”