andrewducker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
andrewducker) wrote2012-02-23 11:00 am
andrewducker) wrote2012-02-23 11:00 am
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Interesting Links for 23-02-2012
- Science Finds a Better Way to Teach Science. (Lectures are pointless. I wish I was even slightly surprised)
- The British idea that ordinary people don't need to understand mathematics causes appalling problems
- How the European Internet Rose Up Against ACTA. (Gives me a warm feeling inside.)
- The myth of the eight-hour sleep - humans may be adapted for two 4-hour naps, with a 2-hour gap in the middle
- What NOT to do when relaunching the Conservatives in Northern Ireland
- A week of picking on trans people
- The Only 4 Monitors You Should Buy
- The iPhone umbilical cord charger. If I had an iPhone, I'd have one.
- How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy
- Orange, T-Mobile ready to launch 4G together in UK this year
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Hmm... you over state the case here but it is not news that lectures are not the most effective way to get the point across. Unfortunately most of the more effective methods are very staff intensive. Given one person and a set amount of material to be got through, a standard lecture may be pretty much your only realistic choice.
All lecturers (pretty much) know that testing students on material, engaging with them and getting them to attempt to answer stuff as you go on helps... of course this all takes time and relies on the students actually participating (e.g. avoiding the "Anyone, anyone, Bueller?" sort of call for participation).
Ellefson ran a study in which a group of students were briefly pushed every day to revisit earlier material, while another group just plowed ahead with the new material.
Which is why a standard lecture course in the sciences also comes with worksheet questions, tutorials and so on.
There's also the question of "to whom are you teaching" -- if you take some of those methods, going back, revisiting material, recapping and so on, it really does help the bottom end but it loses the top end... that is, the less able students get a better deal the more able students a worse deal.
Teaching coding was an eyeopener for me as I interacted with the students regularly in the classroom so could see where they had and where they had not understood what was said.
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"A University of Maryland study of undergraduates found that after a physics lecture by a well-regarded professor, almost no students could provide a specific answer to the question, “What was the lecture you just heard about?” A Kansas State University study found that after watching a video of a highly rated physics lecture, most students still incorrectly answered questions on the material. Wieman himself found that when he quizzed students about a fact he had presented 15 minutes earlier in a lecture, only 10 percent showed any sign of remembering it."
I'm sorry, but that's not a realistic way of doing _anything_. Given a 10% success rate, the answer is not to carry on doing what you're doing, because it's all you can do with one person. If the choices there are "Waste everyone's time for an hour" and "Do nothing" then "nothing" is less wasteful.
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I wouldn't expect students to retain much from just the lecture. I would expect the students to retain the material from the lecture followed up by worksheets, self-study and practice exam questions. In many universities students are completely free to omit the lecture part of this and simply do self-study worksheets and seminars and skip the lectures (and I would support them in that freedom). However, I believe that the lectures are, in fact, useful and the tests you cite do not provide evidence about that, because the students then have the lecture notes to refer to to guide their self study. If the study compared students who went to lectures, did worksheets, revised for exams and sat the exams versus students who did self-study for an hour (or read through the lecture notes) then that would be relevant data.
So the lecture alone doesn't put the material in the students brain... they actually have to look at the notes and read the texts. This is, in itself a hugely valuable skill since it's what a lot of people will need to do in their later working life. I would estimate a decent student should be doing 4 or 5 hours of self-study for every hour I lecture. (that said, by that measure I was a poor student).
Since I have a pile of exams sat on my desk I shall see pretty much exactly how well this works.
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Absolutely. In the meantime I'll continue with my hypothesis that lectures are less useful than reading an introductory book, which would contain material _like_ lecture notes, only more accurate and better written.
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Well, I'm not 100% in agreement with better written since the person who wrote the book is often the person who wrote the lecture notes (and, in fact, lecture notes sometimes become books)... however, it would take a skilled student to pick the material for the course from the book... so, to get the equivalent material for my most recent lecture notes the students would have to read selected chapters from five different books -- I mark which books those are for them should they wish to do that -- they will have a much broader understanding of the subject but it will take them a lot longer -- plus I preface the lecture notes with the introductory material which the text books often miss out or, say, spread over the first five chapters.
I hope it's not arrogance, but to pass my choice a student would have a very very hard time getting that material from text books as I distilled the course to just include those parts it was necessary for me to teach from the many text books I've read.
There are advantages to the text book -- it provides a broader understanding and may have been proof read more -- although now my lecture notes for this course are on their 4th or 5th year through they have the majority of the major bugs worked out.
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Although at least some of the better ones provided their own printed lecture notes, as they realised that spending a lecture half-listening as you frantically scribble is a particularly stupid waste of time.
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http://www.richardclegg.org/lectures/
http://www.richardclegg.org/ccourse/
(The C programming course stuff is pretty old now -- would not teach that these days).
I also do separate slides and lecture notes, some lecturers just send out copies of the slides but I think that means either (a) lots of explanatory text on the slides or (b) slides which make no sense out of context.
Also UCL puts all our lectures on video (to enjoy and enjoy again) so students can recap the main points -- though I doubt that many do.
I know it's easy to bash a "lecture" as a way to deliver information but actually, listening to a lecture is a skill like any other. As I often attend conferences and need to be able to pick up information from a 40 minute verbal presentation with slides, it's a good skill to have.
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I think I'd like to use a time machine to take my degree now. I think I'd be a _lot_ less frustrated.
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I guess I just don't see the advantage of someone reading some text to me over me reading it myself.
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Students have an opportunity to privately discuss with me at the end as well.
However, for the top-end students, missing the lecture and reading the notes might well be 90% as good. That said, I've regularly encountered high-flying students who miss out on learning because they are good enough to get through without reading lecture notes and sometimes have missing techniques in their armoury -- so I've occasionally taught students who were better coders than I am and sometimes regretted that they felt there was little they could learn by going at the pace of the majority.
I'm perfectly happy for students to skip the lecture and read the notes but unfortunately my institution is not and attendance is compulsory and checked with a register -- I wish it weren't.
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In general I think a good coder only needs to know "this is the efficient algorithm" to code it not really to understand fully how the proof of the order of execution time follows.
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That bot pricing thing was awesome. It's like we're living in a scifi novel ... about living in a scifi novel.
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Many people think that this has already happened...
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DEATH TO THE DEMONESS ALLEGRA GELLER
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30 mins: waiting for professor to turn up
60 mins: listening to professor bitch about university politics
10 mins: general banter
20 mins: actual lecture
And yet I wouldn't have missed those lectures for anything.
What lectures teach you that books and notes don't is culture and style. I'm sure the formal content of Prof Brown's lectures on Bremsstrahlung radiation or modelling SS433 could have been delivered on paper, but the style of approaching problems in a particular way, the scientific and intellectual culture that forms the foundation of a way of approaching hard problems - these things are learned much better in person. And learning the astrophysical problem-solving style of the Astronomer Royal is more than worth the investment of time.
I'm not particularly wedded to the lecture per se, but I think that learning is about much more than just the transmission of information, and that contact time between students and senior researchers is incredibly valuable even if it seems terribly inefficient.
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As opposed to what they were which was largely "Watch someone read a bunch of notes to an audience."
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