The fine art of (not) lecturing!
November 5th 2007 22:02
Signature Tune
From the.star.com, Totonto comes the following:
All wrong.
But the notion that people don't remember what they don't pay attention to is now etched into first-year minds.
But the notion that people don't remember what they don't pay attention to is now etched into first-year minds.
an expensive professor read from a textbook is not an intelligent way to transfer information. It's like overloading a computer that doesn't have enough memory,"
But three hours is not being questioned, it should be, but
Nobel Prizewinner Carl Wieman, Canada's new guru of science teaching, who runs a think-tank on teaching science at the University of British Columbia, was flown to Toronto recently to help 500 U of T and York professors rethink how they teach.
His message? Don't drone. Get students talking and guessing and arguing. Our short-term memory can only process four ideas at a time, he warns, so don't try to cram whole chapters into an hour. In a nutshell: reduce the load; stimulate the brain.
"I can't imagine a three-hour lecture, personally, but getting students to flex their brains during class rather than just sit there passively is exactly what we want to see," Wieman said in an interview.
It's that interaction – the answering and arguing and persuading – that stimulates protein in the brain, which in turn helps anchor ideas into long-term memory, he says.
His new think-tank – the $2 million-a-year Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative – will work with science professors in several UBC departments over the next five years to start applying fresh research on how people learn. The focus will be on delivering less content and giving more time for students to debate with each other about ideas.
Wieman's message is something students have complained about for generations.
His message? Don't drone. Get students talking and guessing and arguing. Our short-term memory can only process four ideas at a time, he warns, so don't try to cram whole chapters into an hour. In a nutshell: reduce the load; stimulate the brain.
"I can't imagine a three-hour lecture, personally, but getting students to flex their brains during class rather than just sit there passively is exactly what we want to see," Wieman said in an interview.
It's that interaction – the answering and arguing and persuading – that stimulates protein in the brain, which in turn helps anchor ideas into long-term memory, he says.
His new think-tank – the $2 million-a-year Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative – will work with science professors in several UBC departments over the next five years to start applying fresh research on how people learn. The focus will be on delivering less content and giving more time for students to debate with each other about ideas.
Wieman's message is something students have complained about for generations.
"The average student never mastered more than 30 per cent of the key essential concepts.
"But if you reduce the load of information and have students work the brain vigorously – very much like developing a muscle – research shows you can increase retention to about 65 per cent."
This is crucial, says Wieman, if Canada hopes to produce the level of scientific savvy people need in an age when everything from farming to foreign policy is touched by science.
When are they going to bite the bullet and teach the minimal requirements of making people Science savvy to a wider than Science student audience instead of just relying on Science graduates to shoulder the burden.
What people really need to know can be covered in TV documentaries and the like rather than just trusting it will all happen.
Science in its own way is so often abused and probably essentially so in the wide forums of the environment where the ill informed will often give audience to the equally ill informed and claim it all to be scientific. And no, that does not mean that there are not serious issues about the environment that need to be addressed but the inexpert few leading the inexpert masses is not really the way to go.
Everyone thinks he's an expert nowadays, on often an absolute minimum of knowledge, but facts need to be supported with reason and scientific reason to boot. Let's not allow ourselves to be otherwise persuaded and let's give three hour lectures the boot.
I'm sure there is much of value in what the good professor says but excusing the three hour long, overcrowded lecture theatres in the interests of money is not the way to go.
What do you think?
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