Active Learning-Christopher Sheehan
Lecturing has been the primary means of content delivery since Universities first opened their doors. Today at Universities across the country, a shift from lectures to an active learning approach is taking place. According to Eric Mazur, a professor of physics at Harvard University and a leader in the active learning movement, lectures do not accomplish nearly as much as teachers and students think. A series of reports beginning in the 1980s by the National Institute of Education (1984), the Association of American Colleges (1985), and also educational studies conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s by scholars including Astin (1987), Boyer (1987) and Tinto (1987), noted that a growing number of institutions began to reform educational practice and restructure classrooms to involve students more actively in learning (Burton 2010).
The word “lecture” comes from the Latin word meaning “to read”. Typically, an instructor stands at the front of the room talking or presenting while the students sit quietly, some taking notes. A famous painting from 1350 by Laurentius de Voltolina shows Henry of Germany delivering a lecture at the University of Bologna. Lectures are often viewed as promoting a one-way transfer of information from the lecturer to the students, who adopt a passive role within the learning environment (Fry, Ketteridge & Marshall, 2006). The painting depicts students seated in rows. Some of the students are talking to each other while other students are sleeping, all while the instructor is presenting to the students.
Lecturing has some obvious limitations. Teachers who primarily lecture assume a great deal about the ability levels and skills of their students. For students to successfully receive lecture based content, the student must have the ability to take notes effectively. Note-taking is a skill that needs to be developed. According to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center at Columbia University, “students capture only 20-40 percent of a lecturer's main ideas in their notes”. Additionally, for students to receive lecture-based content successfully, the students must have a strong auditory learning style. According to the University of Southern Maine’s Student Success Center, “most students don’t naturally listen in the way that the lecture setting demands, yet 80% of content is gained through listening.”
A large reason for the shift away from lecturing is the technological innovations that are now available in education. According to Dr. Tim Lahey, infectious diseases specialist and Associate Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, “A large reason for the shift is that much of the information conveyed in a typical lecture is already available for free, at any time, online, freeing up class time for more in-depth, hands-on work.” Many faculty members at universities are now wondering if it still makes sense to deliver a lecture during class time when lectures from the world’s leading instructors are available for students to watch on their own schedule.
Simultaneously, there are other factors influencing the shift away from lecturing. Administrators, parents, politicians, and even advocacy groups want to see evidence that students are truly learning in college, especially for the increasingly large sums of money that students are paying. These external forces agree that instructors cannot continue to just push out information and hope that their students are learning it. If the purpose of a college education is for students to learn, then academe is failing according to Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. The book cites data of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college (Arum and Roksa 2011).
When I was 19 years old I took my first science courses in a university setting. My first science course was an introduction to physics course. I was always a strong math and science student in middle school and high school so I felt comfortable walking into my new science class at the university. I remember walking into the auditorium and thinking I must be in the wrong place or took a wrong turn. I looked around and there were at least 90 people in this class. It turns out that I was in the right spot. I had never experienced a large enrollment course before and for the first time at college, I was a bit overwhelmed. I remember finding a seat about 35 rows from the teacher and settling in. The class started shortly thereafter.
Physics 101 is actually a very difficult course. Physics 101 in a room full of 90 people became extremely difficult. My instructor was a very fast talker. He also got very excited so his tone would fluctuate a great deal giving me a false sense of importance about nearly everything he said. After the first five minutes of class, I found myself attempting to write down nearly everything that he said. Sadly, I was not doing a very good job of it. Soon class was over and many of the students huddled after to clarify aspects of the instructor’s lecture with each other. After a few classes went by, the post-class huddle session quickly became a post-class complaint session. Students were confused about content and as uncomfortable as I was about not being able to ask questions. Although our instructor had a great deal to say about physics, the content was not well organized or easy to follow. It seemed that we were all tasked with learning physics on our own. None of us felt involved in our physics course.
It was after the fourth or fifth class that a group of us headed down to the tutoring area and signed up for additional tutoring. This constituted the first time in my academic career I needed “additional support” and I was a bit frustrated. When we finally met with our tutor, her name was Bina, we all began a series of activities she devised to help us learn physics. We would work through problems as a group and she would regularly stop us and have us discuss with each other the steps that we were completing. Bina would also switch things up about every ten minutes or so, it was very clear to me that Bina had a two-step process for teaching physics. She had the information transfer but she also wanted her students to make sense and assimilate the information. Bina was a great teacher. Bina used active learning strategies.
Recently a meta-analysis of 225 studies published (May 2014) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences led by Scott Freeman of the University of Washington found that undergraduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses with a lecture-only format were one-and-a-half times more likely to fail than were those in classes involving some form of active learning. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.” Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work commented about the importance of the newly published article, “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.” (Bajak 2014)
According to the University of Minnesota Teaching and Learning Center, “We might think of active learning as an approach to instruction in which students engage the material they study through reading, writing, talking, listening, and reflecting. While this definition could include activities such as homework, active learning is truly the activities that are introduced in the classroom setting. An example of an active learning strategy is the “peer instruction” strategy developed by Eric Manzur. The following excerpt is from a presentation on active learning Mazur did with the faculty at Vanderbilt University’s School of Medicine on April 4th, 2013."The teacher poses a question to his or her students. The students ponder the question silently and transmit their individual answers using the clickers. The teacher checks the histogram of student responses. If significant numbers of students choose the wrong answer, the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbor. After a few minutes of discussion, the students submit their answers again. This technique often (but not always!) results in more students choosing the correct answer as a result of the peer instruction phase of the activity. This is a fairly simple way to use clickers to engage a large number of students in discussions about course material. This approach can also set the stage for a class-wide discussion that more fully engages all students."
In addition to the lecture, another area that active learning is impacting is the physical classroom space. New active learning classrooms are being built at universities across the country with the primary goal of establishing a highly collaborative, hands on, interactive learning environment. The origins of the active learning classroom come from the SCALE-UP project at NC State University. From the original one classroom redesign, at last count there are now over 150 institutions adopting or adapting the SCALE-UP approach. According to the SCALE -UP website “Rigorous evaluations of learning have been conducted in parallel with the curriculum development and classroom design efforts. Besides hundreds of hours of classroom video and audio recordings, different schools have conducted numerous interviews and focus groups, conducted many conceptual learning assessments (using nationally-recognized instruments in a pretest/posttest protocol), and collected portfolios of student work. NC State has data comparing nearly 16,000 traditional and SCALE-UP students taking physics. Their findings can be summarized as the following:
● students' ability to solve problems is improved
● their conceptual understanding is increased
● their attitudes are better
● failure rates (especially for women and minorities) are drastically reduced
● "at risk" students do better in later courses.
It is clear that the lecture will never die, and I am not arguing that it should. I believe there are appropriate times and reasons to deliver content using a lecture. It is also clear that a shift needs to take place from the lecture being the primary content delivery mechanism to much more frequent opportunities for the students to work with the information the instructor is providing, a shift to active learning. Active learning engages the student. The benefits to incorporating active learning are many. They include improved critical thinking skills, increased retention and transfer of new information, increased motivation, and improved interpersonal skills.
References
Anyone Still Listening? Educators Consider Killing the Lecture. (n.d.). MindShift. Retrieved July 2, 2014, from http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/anyone-still-listening-educators-consider-killing-the-lecture
Burton, H. B. (2011). Efficacy of active and collaborative learning environments in community. S.l.: Proquest, Umi Dissertatio.
Felder, R. M. and Brent, R. (2010), The National Effective Teaching Institute: Assessment of Impact and Implications for Faculty Development. Journal of Engineering Education, 99: 121–134. doi: 10.1002/j.2168-9830.2010.tb01049.x
Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds. (n.d.). Science/AAAS. Retrieved July 2, 2014, from http://news.sciencemag.org/education/2014/05/lectures-arent-just-boring-theyre-ineffective-too-study-finds
SCALE-UP. (n.d.). SCALE-UP. Retrieved July 2, 2014, from http://www.ncsu.edu/per/scaleup.html
Scott Freeman, Sarah L. Eddy, Miles McDonough, Michelle K. Smith, Nnadozie Okoroafor, Hannah Jordt, and Mary Pat Wenderoth Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics PNAS 2014 111: 8410-8415.
Wasley, P. (2006). Underrepresented students benefit most from engagement. Chronicle of Higher Education, 53(13). Retrieved November 18, 2006, from http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i13
<What Is Active Learning?. (n.d.). What Is Active Learning?. Retrieved July 2, 2014, from http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tutorials/active/what/http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/anyone-still-listening-educators-consider-killing-the-lecture/>
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