Your post is interesting. It is the first time I have ever heard a
student state a preference for more traditional lecturing over
PowerPoint lectures. I happen to think you make a very important point.
However, I have heard the complaint from students, regarding a colleague
whom they chose to blame for their lack of success, that, "He doesn't
even use PowerPoint for lectures. He just uses overheads and the chalk
board. Sometimes it looks like he is making things up as he goes, and
he makes us tell him what we want to know. He needs to just tell us
what we need to know." I was required to attend that colleague's
lectures as part of a university peer evaluation program. He was doing
a superb job of leading students to make points for themselves, and at
one point even asked students to put diagrams on the board themselves,
while he coached them through the exercise. This was in a freshman
level "honors section." But most of his time was spent in a "chalk
talk" type lecture, fairly traditional with good content. Many of the
students seemed very pleased with the process, and despite the
complaints I heard (from multiple students), my colleague received
decent student evaluation scores.
That was several years ago, when PowerPoint was fast becoming a dominant
approach to lecturing.
Thanks for your post. David Mc
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Kevin Mueller wrote:
Perhaps this is well tread ground, but I think there is an important
element missing in the recent discussion regarding effective teaching
styles, particular with respect to lectures. What is the impact of
detailed PowerPoint presentations on student attendance,
participation, and learning? My experience (mostly as a student, some
as a teaching assistant) is that lectures can be very effective means
to reach a majority of students in a classroom, regardless of size.
However, when the lecture consists of detail laden PowerPoint slides,
active thought by students is discouraged because more of the
information is at hand at any given moment of the lecture and there is
less incentive to anticipate where the lecturer is going or follow
his/her thought process. Moreover, when the PowerPoint presentations
are made available before, during, or after class, there is little
incentive to go to class or to pay attention because the student
perceives that they can get most of the information without attending
class. This style of lecturing is inherently 'less active' than more
traditional lecture styles with chalkboards or overheads and has
become increasingly common.
Thus, following the posts by Bill, Luke, Arathi and Jane, I think
lectures can accommodate something that approaches active learning and
teaching, but the means of transferring information is critical.
Lectures such as those described by Bill and Luke may represent the
best available compromise between two distinctly different learning
and teaching styles (pure lecture vs. pure active learning). In the
absence of having institutions that are dedicated to one or the other
teaching style, which would give students the ability to choose which
style suits them best, it seems most prudent to aim for middle of the
road approaches such as that outlined by Luke.
Kevin Mueller
Penn State University
Intercollege Graduate Program in Ecology
[email protected]
