I have long pointed out the ineffectiveness of lecture-based teaching methods. Research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences should nail the coffin shut on lecture based teaching as a form of educational abuse. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.abstract Not only do lectures bore kids and dull their interests in schooling, they are a failure at getting good results.
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Make, fix and create. Assist others in learning likewise
I have no doubt about the benefit of active learning; especially for STEM.
ReplyDeleteI read in that paper the definitions:
- Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening to an expert. It emphasizes higher-order thinking and often involves group work.
- traditional lecturing as “...continuous exposition by the teacher.” Under this definition, student activity was assumed
to be limited to taking notes and/or asking occasional and unprompted
questions of the instructor.
Some remarks:
1- The learning processes in this study of studies were not "pure" active learning" but traditional lecturing enhanced with a variable proportion of active learning;
2- Once the student have made experiments, there is still a need to formalise the conclusions. To arrive to a concept. Express the concept with the adequate vocabulary. Putting it in equation if relevant. Making the link with other concepts; etc.
3- A great proportion of people (some advance even 52%) are more of the introvert kind. I am not sure everybody is comfortable with discussion in class and group work;
4- Before experimentation, in medicine, theories were elaborated only by discussion and were generally very far from scientific facts. (search for Andreas Vesalius) That is not to say, of course, that the results of an experiment must not be discussed.
A long time ago, I saw on TV, US university engineering students given a battery, a piece of electric conductor and a bulb. Then they were asked to light the bulb. A lot of them were unable to do it. How is that possible?