Lecture Coverage

This week I was fortunate to receive a request for a weekly SoTL topic addressing content ‘coverage.’ So, I would like to share a December 2015 article entitled, “On the use and misuse of lectures in higher education” by Schmidt et al. The authors remind us that lectures are effective only to a limited extent. They do not promote critical thinking; student attendance tends to be low and so is cognitive engagement. The idea that lectures should and can cover all essential subject matter is false. Moreover, empirical literature on what students actually learn from lectures is lacking. A most fundamental problem of lectures is that they are based on the information transmission fallacy, the idea that students learn just by being told.

Alternatively as we have shared in many prior SoTL papers, an active learning approach has been shown to be more effective for learning. The approach which the authors of this paper used has four key elements:

an initial individual learning attempt by students to master important concepts or ideas,
the presentation of a relevant problem by the instructor,
elaborative activities of individual students or small groups of peers to come up with solutions to the problem, and
timely, critical feedback.

The authors share a brief history of lecture and ‘readers’ concluding that contact time with students is limited. An instructor cannot, in sufficient detail, discuss all subject matter to be learned. They have to summarize topics, focus on perceived essential concepts, describe in approximate fashion, or select topics at the expense of others. Therefore, instructors often feel that they have insufficiently covered the material [AND students have rarely processed the information in a way that can be of use to them in their future].

The authors further find that lecturing falls prey to the “information transmission fallacy.” Implicit to conventional lecturing is the idea that information can be directly transmitted from one person to another. The other person then stores the information as communicated by the sender, and what is transmitted is remembered, provided the receiver pays attention. This is a misconception because the human mind does not work as a receiver. Students have to DO something with the information to enable them to use it in the future. They have to be able to elaborate using their prior knowledge, to rephrase in their own words, to discuss, to explain, or to apply the information. All these activities help students store the information in memory for long-term use. This is because our memory is constructive. We have to use what we already know about a topic to construct meaning for new information about that topic and have to use the resulting cognitive representations in a variety of settings to reinforce and stabilize them.

The evidence of this research strongly suggests that active learning in the classroom setting supports and fosters learning to a much larger extent than “covering” material.

References

Schmidt, H., Wagener, S., Smeets, G.,Keemink, L. & van der Molen, H. (2015). On the use and misuse of lectures in higher education, Health Professions Education, 1(1), 12-18, ISSN 2452-3011, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpe.2015.11.010