Science proves: lectures are boring and ineffective

If you've always thought of an excuse to miss that boring-looking lecture, here's the ideal excuse: It's scientifically proven that you can't learn anything during lectures. The secret to a group of people better assimilate the information that a speaker - or teacher - is going is to promote different activities every ten minutes.

A recent study, whose results were published in Science Insider column proved that college students are 1.5 times more likely to not learn when they are in a content lectures or classes made monologues.

"Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and has been lecturing the predominant way of teaching ever since, " said biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington. Although the rule is indeed applied to date, during which time many educators began to develop new methods for teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The argument has always been that encourage students to participate and ask always brought good results.

Analyze

To substantiate this information, Freeman and a group of colleagues analyzed 225 studies on teaching methods used in classes aimed at college students. The result of this analysis concluded that teaching more closely to students makes them more involved, which is better than monologue in front of a group of passive listeners.

In fact, this less monotonous type of education halves the chances of a student getting bad grades. The physicist Eric Mazur at Harvard University, said it is almost unethical to know these differences between teaching methods and not change the way they teach. He believes that this proves that Super Crunching lectures are inefficient and outdated.

Two sides

There is also a fully correct way to teach. What is known is asking questions to the students, calling them individually or in groups to participate in discussions and even ask them to explain to colleagues some of the content is certainly efficient in the time to learn.

Freeman claims to use these techniques even in groups with many students. According to him, one of his classes gets to have up to 700 students and even then, it is not done in absolute silence - quite the opposite: it interacts with academics and can leave them free to develop questions.

But Professor Noah Finkelstein, the University of Colorado, believes that this analysis does not mean that the talks should be abolished altogether. According to him, at times you need to do less dynamic approaches with students. So, what do you prefer: classes in which only the teacher speaks or learn more when everyone participates?

* Posted on 23/12/2016