Don't Lecture Me, Part Ii

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Last week’s post on the lecture as an instructional model produced incredibly varied responses, from enthusiastic gratitude for my support of active learning to enthusiastic defense of lecturing.  The nature of some of the replies has prompted me to revisit the topic and elaborate upon my ideas.

The first thing I think that needs to be pointed out is that neither I, nor any of the researchers I cite, claim that students do not or cannot learn from a lecture.  The cited studies claim that students learn more effectively from active learning pedagogies, not that they fail to learn in a lecture model.

Perhaps the most troubling response I received was one that bemoaned the fact that the learning style of middle-class white males was being neglected, and claimed that this group was the “least studied demographic.”  That’s patently not the case.  The studies I cite absolutely include middle-class white males.  (Does anyone think the Harvard self-study fails to include this demographic?)  Furthermore, the studies do not conclude that middle-class white males learn best from lecture and everyone else learns best from active learning.  They conclude that all students benefit from active learning, but that some students—women, minorities, low-income students, and first-generation college students—experience greater benefits than others.

Secondly (or thirdly?), the debate about the merits of the lecture versus the merits of active learning is not a debate about learning styles.  It’s not simply a debate about passive learning versus active learning or about aural learning versus hands-on learning.  In fact, as Dan Willingham is fond of emphasizing in his work, the research on learning styles has largely been discredited because no one has been able to prove that students learn more effectively when a particular style is preferenced over another.  Usually when we talk about our learning style we’re really talking about our learning preference.

For example, when I was an undergraduate, I had a political science course that met for a large lecture three times a week in Montieth.  The professor was a fairly good lecturer, but his lectures pretty much just reiterated the material in the books he assigned, and when I took my midterm exam, there was nothing on there I couldn’t have gotten from the books.  I like to read, and the class met at eight AM, so I took a risk and stopped attending the lectures but continued to diligently read the books.  And when the simpulan exam came around, I aced it.  But this does not mean that I couldn’t have decided to ditch the books and attend the lectures, instead, and done just as well.  Surely I could have.  That’s not a matter of learning style but of learning preference.

So the next question to address is whether or not this “proves” that a lecture course would work just as well as an active learning course.  The research says no, it wouldn’t.  But the difference is not one of style.  The difference is that active learning involves multiple learning modes.  Students read, write, work independently, work in groups, work one-on-one with the instructor, et cetera.  Cognitively, students are moving along (or creating) many neural pathways rather than just one.

Someone defending the lecture might add that students can and should write notes, that the lecturer could show video or audio, that the lecture can be supplemented with discussion groups or with an online component.  And yes, they can, but what you’re doing when you make these modifications is making the lecture look more and more like active learning.  Departments and individual professors make these modifications to large lecture courses all the time—because they know they improve student learning!  In fact, deans and department heads would, by and large, love to offer smaller classes with more active learning models.  The main reason they offer large lecture halls is because of cost, not because lectures improve student learning.

Finally, several people responded by trying to find a middle ground in which lecture has a place, and in response to that I’d say, yes, of course.  Lecture has a place.  For example, anyone who uses a workshop model of instruction in their language arts or English classroom uses lecture all the time in the form of mini-lessons.  They are a core component of an effective workshop model.  But they are just that—a component. 

Exclusive use of lecture, however, is not optimal for student learning.  Not for any subject matter.  Not for any demographic.  There is no research that supports this.

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