Title:
Lecture or Interactive Teaching? New Study of an Old
Issue
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
Professors have lectured for centuries. But how
effective is lecturing to students compared to
working with them? A new study compared two classes
of a beginning physics course at the University of
British Columbia in Canada. There were more than two
hundred sixty students in each section. Both were
taught by popular and experienced professors. The
study took place for one week near the end of the
year. One class continued to be taught in the
traditional lecture style. The other professor was
replaced by two teachers. They had little teaching
experience but received training in interactive
teaching methods. The training was led by Carl
Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who leads a
science education program.There was almost no
lecturing. The teachers put the students in small
groups to discuss and answer questions. The
instructors always gave feedback after the groups
did tasks. And they gave readings and quizzes to
finish before class so the students would come
prepared to discuss the material. Professor Wieman
says there was a great deal of data showing how
identical these two large sections of the class were
before the study. At the end of the experiment, both
classes took the same test. Students in the
interactive class scored nearly twice as high as
those in the traditional class. Attendance also
increased that week. Graduate student Ellen Schelew
was one of the teachers. She says the methods they
used are designed to encourage students to think
like scientists. Also, as part of the teaching, The
study appeared in May in the journal Science. It
seems to confirm earlier findings about lecturing to
large classes. But some experts have criticized the
way the study was done. Both of the researchers who
taught the class, Ms. Schelew and Louis Deslauriers,
were also authors of the study. This could raise
questions about whether their involvement might have
influenced the results. Professor Wieman is
currently on leave from the University of British
Columbia and the University of Colorado. He is the
associate director for science in the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy. He says
research has shown better ways to teach based on
evidence about how the brain learns. And he hopes
more professors will learn that how someone teaches
may be more important than who does the teaching.
For VOA Special English, I'm Alex Villarreal. You
can find a link to the physics test that the
students took at voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
