Keeping up with the volume of information continually produced in any discipline often feels like a herculean endeavor, and that’s for experts. When we then try to structure our courses so that they reflect the “best,” “most current,” and “cutting edge” information in our field, the problem becomes all the more fraught. On a ten-week schedule, it’s already hard to squeeze in all the stuff that we want students to learn. If we add in segments to treat the newest findings, we can feel like lecture has been reduced to a recounting of data and ideas in a manner resembling the rapid, only half-comprehendable buzz of livestock auctions. It doesn’t help that we’re being reminded that traditional lecture formats aren’t very effective at encouraging learning. Moreover, certain colleagues out there (eh hem, yours truly among them) take every available opportunity to promote the value of active learning in the classroom–for classes of all sizes. But if one is running short on time already, and the content *must* be covered, what time does that leave for conversation? For in-class activities? For pauses and silences while students process one set of ideas and imagine its implications for the next set to be explored?
Although I don’t have room in the space of a blog post to unpack all of these ideas and to suggest strategies for addressing each issue, I thought I would share an abstract from an article I recently read that talks about the impact to student learning of adding more and more information to lectures. The authors are sympathetic to the perceived need to ensure that students are learning as much as possible. But they also find that the foundational learning that can occur in lecture is mitigated when an instructor packs too much new, noteworthy, and otherwise relevant-to-experts information into that same 50-minute period. A link to the abstract is here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6492106
I welcome your feedback.
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