As it pertains to passive vs. active teaching methods, I believe both forms of teaching are valuable tools. If the objective is to transfer a given amount of factual information, passive methods of learning seem the better tool. If the objective is to teach students how to think, how to critically analyze and interpret the information they've learned, then active learning is the better tool. It seems from my perspective as a student that a careful usage of both methods in a logical and organized way would be an effective way to teach students. For example, a professor teaching freshman biology starts her lecture. She presents a great deal of factual information via pictures, graphs, and her verbal explanations. The students take notes of all the significant details presented. Then, either throughout the course of the lecture or at the end of the lecture, she stops and presents the students with critical thinking questions or challenges. Something like this would do: "During your studies of species X in the wild, you have observed this species to have large claws on its front feet. Hypothesize why this species has large claws on its front feet and then design an experiment to test your hypothesis." This example and others like it could be issued as a homework assignment or a cooperative classroom activity. Different students learn more effectively in different ways, so the technique could be adapted to the situation (small class size vs. large class size, etc). A little food for thought. Hardly original, but I found as a student that when teachers combined these methods that I not only remembered more factual information but also expanded my ability to think critically. I hope I haven't been too long-winded and that my input is appreciated. Thank you for reading! --- Derek E. Pursell
--- On Sun, 1/24/10, Luke K. Butler <[email protected]> wrote: From: Luke K. Butler <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [ECOLOG-L] decline in education, comment on active learning To: [email protected] Date: Sunday, January 24, 2010, 7:30 PM 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 *************************** *************************** Luke K. Butler Assistant Professor Department of Biology The College of New Jersey 2000 Pennington Road Ewing, NJ 08628 609.771.2531 ***************************
