Don’t Lecture Me! Science Finds Traditional Lectures Fail Students
Did you ever fall asleep in class during a lecture? Don’t feel bad, it’s been happening since the lecture was invented. Look at the 14th-century painting of a lecture above. That guy in blue with the sweet headband is totally napping. But maybe it wasn’t entirely your fault. A recent study has shown that undergraduate students subjected to traditional lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students taught by more active learning methods. “Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” says biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington, Seattle, but others have argued for a more active way. Freeman and his colleagues did a meta-analysis of 225 studies of teaching methods in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) courses, and found that teachers who made students active participants with questions and group activities had more success. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a