List Members.....
Apologies for cross-posting. I make this post about 1x/year. I know your e-mail
boxes are full. This is more for new Teachers/Educators or new list members.
This is an example of what they are doing at Stanford. Amazing at how their
posts correlate with what is being discussed on these lists daily. I don't know
Rick Reis, Ph.D. or have any part in this list. He continues to do great stuff.
It is a great resource. Also, they have all of their past posts archived.
Thank you.
Mike Nolan
In Nunn's (1996) observational study of participation in college classrooms, on
average less than 6 percent of class time involved student interaction. That's
three minutes of student talk per 50 minutes of class time.
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Folks:
The brief posting below gives some thoughts on how to engage students more
effectively in lecture classes. It is from Chapter 4 Taking Stock of What
Faculty Know About Student Learning, by Maryellen Weimer, professor emeritus of
Teaching and Learning at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park,
PA, in an excellent new book, Taking Stock: Research on Teaching and Learning
in Higher Education, edited by Julia Christensen Hughes and Joy Mighty. Hughes
is the past president of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher
Education and professor and dean of the College of Management and Economics at
the University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Mighty is president of the
Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and professor and
director, Centre for Teaching and Learning at Queen's University, Kingston,
Ontario, Canada
It is part of the Queen's Policy Studies Series, School of Policy Studies,
Queens's University
McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal & Kingston - London - Ithaca.
Copyright 2010 school of Policy Studies, Queen's University at Kingston,
Canada. Reprinted with permission.
Regards,
Rick Reis
[email protected]
UP NEXT: Teaching the Millennial Generation
Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning
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Why Are Students So Passive and What Can Teachers Do to Effectively Engage
Them in the Learning Process?
Students are passive in part because instruction continues to be so didactic. A
survey of 172,000 faculty in the US (nearly one out of every three) found that
76 percent list the lecture as their primary instructional method (Finkelstein,
Seal, and Schuster 1998). Lectures can be engaging, but most encourage
passivity with excessive amounts of teacher talk. In Nunn's (1996)
observational study of participation in college classrooms, on average less
than 6 percent of class time involved student interaction. That's three minutes
of student talk per 50 minutes of class time.
So if teachers lectured less, what would students be doing in class? They could
be learning from and with each other. The viability of group work, especially
co-operate learning structures, is well documented by educational research. In
the post-secondary arena, Springer, Stanne, and Donnovan's (1999) meta-analysis
of studies on group work in math, science, and engineering disciplines showed
these collective learning experiences positively affected academic achievement
and persistence in college. Often, the case for students learning from and with
each other is a hard sell in heavily content-oriented disciplines, but the
evidence from research on student learning conducted in those fields verifies
more generic findings. for example, in chemistry (and even though these studies
were conducted within non-educational disciplines, they are well-designed and
carefully executed educational studies), McCreary, Golde, and Koeske (2006)
found that students in labs led by students (who
had successfully completed the lab previously and were trained in conducting
the labs) learned more than students in labs taught by instructors. Lewis and
Lewis (2005) found that when one chemistry lecture per week was replaced by a
guided discussion facilitated by peers, students in the discussion sections did
not learn less (as measured by final exam scores), causing the researchers to
conclude: "Fears that students who had less exposure to lecture would learn
less proved to be groundless in this study" (p.139).
The case for active learning in general is made across a patchwork of different
studies done by educational researchers as well as faculty researchers based in
the disciplines. The diversity of the approaches used to study those methods
that engage students makes them difficult to compare but Prince (2004) has done
a masterful job of organizing and integrating this work. He concluded that
"...there is broad but uneven support for the core elements of active,
collaborative, co-operative and problem-based learning" (p.223). This support
is not just for involvement in activity per se but substantiates that the
various kinds of student engagement explored in these studies results in better
learning -- whether that is longer retention of content, greater facility in
applying what has been learned, or a deeper understanding of the content.
In sum, the propensity of students to sit back and have education "done unto
them" is reinforced by the continued reliance on didactic instruction.
Educational research of various sorts verifies that any number of different
methods can successfully engage and involve students in learning. Use of these
active learning approaches does not automatically sacrifice content knowledge
of dilute the intellectual currency of a course.
REFERENCES
Finkelstein, M.J., R.K. Seal, and J. Schuster. 1998. The New Academic
Generation: A Profession in Transformation. Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press.
Lewis, S.E. and J.E. Lewis. 2005. Departing form Lectures: An Evaluation of a
Peer-Led Guided Inquiry Alternative. Journal of Chemical Education 82(1):135-39.
McCeary, C.L., M.F. Golde, and R. Koeske. 2006. Peer Instruction in General
Chemistry Laboratory: Assessment of Student Learning. Journal of Chemical
Education 83(5):804-10.
Nunn, C.E. 1996. Discussion in the College Classroom: Triangulating
Observational and Survey Results. Journal of Higher Education
67(3):243-66.
Prince, M. 2004. Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research. Journal
of Engineering Education 93(3);223-31.
Springer, L., M.E. Stanne, and S.S. Donovan. 1999. Effects of Small-Group
Learning on Undergraduates in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and
Technology: A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research 69(1):21-51.
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