Bill Silvert's example points to a way out of the debate about whether
the extremes of information-transfer based, professor-oriented, pure
lecture format classes are better than so-called student-oriented,
active learning classrooms. It comes down to what goals you have for
your students. If you want your students to be able to memorize a
particular set of information, then in the classroom you should
probably spend most of your time telling them what information you
want them to know, and your exams should test how well they've
memorized the information you told them to memorize. Likewise, if you
want your students to be able to do something else (analyze new
information, predict things, communicate their ideas about the topic,
and compare this to that), then your class, and your exams, should be
organized around those abilities. As the teacher, you say what the
learning goals are for your students. If you don't organize your class
time and grading system around that, then no matter what type of class
you run, you will have poor teaching evaluations and your students
probably will not achieve what you want them to achieve.
In my own extremely limited experience along these lines, I once
taught an intro biology class packed with very smart, very motivated
first-semester undergraduate biology majors. On the first couple of
exams, a large proportion of the class exhibited a remarkable ability
to repeat phrases from their 1,300-page textbook verbatim, or nearly
verbatim. Often those responses didn't really answer the question, but
it demonstrated strong ability and motivation to commit a lot of
detailed information to memory in a pretty short time, even though
we'd only gone over it once in class together in a more-or-less
standard lecture format. On the other hand, given some very simple
observation of a biological phenomenon that we had discussed (e.g.,
"Fetal hemoglobin has a higher oxygen binding affinity than maternal
hemoglobin."), very few of those same students could propose a
hypothesis of any kind (i.e., wacky or probable/based in reality) to
explain that observation, make any kind of prediction that followed
from their hypothesis, propose any kind of logical test (practical or
impractical) of their prediction, and draw a graph that illustrated
their predicted results. Since I wanted my students to be able to do
those things, we practiced them several times in class using pretty
basic so-called "active learning" techniques (which probably took 5-10
minutes per class), and about four weeks later, nearly all of the
students could successfully demonstrate those abilities on the exam,
starting with an observation that had not even been part of the class
material (i.e., the first time they were given the observation was in
the exam question). I doubt that adding that learning component to the
class took away from the factual learning they were already doing
(they still gave plenty of textbook phrases on exams), and I don't
know of a way to have people learn to do something without them
practicing the doing of it. So, active learning was probably required
to meet my learning goal, or at least it was effective in meeting that
goal. If I didn't have that goal, it wouldn't make sense to use active
learning methods. If you want your students to memorize facts and
demonstrate their ability to do so, then you should use an information-
transfer oriented teaching style, and test your students accordingly.
I have found this book to be a helpful entry-level resource in this
area:
Handelsman, J., S. Miller, and C. Pfund. 2007. Scientific Teaching. W.
H. Freeman and Company. New York, NY.
Luke
***************************
Luke K. Butler
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
The College of New Jersey
2000 Pennington Road
Ewing, NJ 08628
609.771.2531
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***************************
Luke K. Butler
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
The College of New Jersey
2000 Pennington Road
Ewing, NJ 08628
609.771.2531
***************************
