Most teachers still lecture a lot despite evidence showing that straight lecture is less effective than teaching approaches that more actively engage and involve students. I don’t think that conclusion rules out didactic instruction. Sometimes it makes sense to just “tell” students about the content. Should we lecture less? For most of us, the answer is yes. But here’s a new response and it moves our thinking in a different direction. In a recent “teacher-ready research review” (one of an ongoing series in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology about which I cannot say enough good things), William Cerbin proposes “a focus on the processes of learning, how and why students learn or do not learn from lectures. If students learn less or do not learn from lectures, we should try to identify the underlying causes and then work on improving the method.” (p. 152)
Here’s Cerbin’s basic assertion: Learning from lectures “depends on students’ deep cognitive engagement with the material before, during, and after a lecture. His article explores engagement at all three of those times. Here’s a summary of his analysis of engagement before the lecture.
“What students know before a lecture in large part determines what they will learn during a lecture.” (p. 152) Students don’t come to any learning experience with blank slates (or maybe these days it’s empty tablets). They have prior knowledge. Drawing from and building on the work of Ambrose, et.al in How Learning Works, Cerbin discusses four different kinds of prior knowledge, each with implications for learning during the lecture.
- Insufficient prior knowledge – Not having the necessary background knowledge makes learning from lectures more difficult. “Students will struggle to identify the meanings of new terminology, differentiate main ideas from detail; graph how one idea relates to another, and build a coherent representation of the lecture material.” (p. 153) And this is something most students do not understand. They regularly show up for lectures not having done the reading, not having reviewed their notes, and not recognizing that being unprepared makes it harder to learn from the lecture.
- Inaccurate prior knowledge – The knowledge students bring with them to a lecture may be incorrect. They might be confused about some minor detail or their misunderstanding might rest on beliefs that can make it difficult to change what students mistakenly assume.
- Inappropriate prior knowledge – The issue here are those generic understandings that tend to be superficial and not cognizant of underlying complexities. Cerbin illustrates this with the terms average, confidence, and random, which are colloquially understood by most students but if presented in a statistics course their meanings are precise and technical. If students rely on their easy definitions, misunderstandings will result.
- Inert prior knowledge – This is knowledge students have but they can’t retrieve it or apply it in new situations. Students who aren’t confident learners are quick to conclude they don’t have the knowledge they currently need. They feign forgetfulness or suggest that content wasn’t covered in a previous course. Those responses are easier than trying to piece together what they in fact do know.
This presents quite a challenge for the teacher who may be dealing with all four of the prior knowledge problems in a class and for students who are experiencing more than one of the problems. What helps the most is finding out what students do and don’t know about a topic. No, you can’t do this for every student and on every topic. But as you repeatedly teach a course, you can develop a reasonably accurate understanding of their prior knowledge by asking questions, doing quick checks on learning during the lecture, and seeing demonstrations of knowledge on assignments and exams.
Cerbin makes a strong case for pre-lecture assignments. What do students need to know to understand the lecture material? And what kind of assignments will lead to that understanding? What he proposes aren’t generic reading assignments that students can skip without consequences. He recommends things like quizzes, assignments where student use the reading material to say, complete a matrix, or homework activities that involve students in analysis of cases, scenarios, or data sets.
We’ve already spent too much time on the lecture vs. active learning debate. We need to move forward and Cerbin’s article offers a path to more productive thinking about both.
Reference: Cerbin, W. (2018). Improving student learning from lectures. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 4 (3), 151-163.
