FOR THE past 600 years our educational system has been centered on teaching students through traditional classroom lectures. With new findings from cognitive research in the past two decades and advances in wireless technology, we should now rethink how to teach students from high school to college so we can compete globally.
In the year 2000 I asked my third year students at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston how much they had learned from lectures. The reply of the majority was: about 10 percent. This simple informal survey got me thinking that maybe we are doing it wrong, that maybe we are wasting 90 percent of the students’ time.
Indiana University professors Joan Middendorf and Alan Kalish described a study on human attention and retention at the 1996 National Teaching and Learning Forum. In their report, they showed the ebb and flow of students’ focus during a standard hourlong lecture. Students were shown to need three to five minutes to settle down, followed by a best-focus period of 10-18 minutes. After that, no matter how interesting the topic or how good the teacher, the attention of most students was shown to wane. Attention came back in shorter duration, about three or four minutes, near the end of the lecture.
This study by Middendorf and Kalish has been ignored by our educational system for about 20 years. It is only in the past few years that many colleges in the United States have been moving away from teaching based on classroom lectures.
At Harvard University, physics professor Eric Mazur, who was popular and successful in teaching introductory physics to premed and engineering students, questioned his own method of teaching after reading a report by Arizona State professor David Hestenes in the American Journal of Physics. Hestenes came to this conclusion when he observed the results of a simple test administered to thousands of undergraduates in southwestern United States: “After a semester of physics, [the students] still held the same misconceptions as they had at the beginning of the term.”
Obviously, the traditional way of teaching—through lectures—is not as effective as most professors would like to think.
Mazur thus experimented on a different way of teaching. Instead of his usual method of explaining a concept continuously, he stopped at one point and told his students: “Why don’t you discuss it with each other?” The lecture room of 150 students was suddenly astir with pairs or groups talking with one another about the concept or problem being discussed. In just about three minutes, the students managed to figure it out.
This was a surprise to Mazur who had just spent 10 minutes expounding on the concept to the class.
He thought about what had happened and came up with an analysis: The student who easily understood the concept explained it to another student who did not get it at once. And the latter learned the concept without much difficulty from the former’s explanation than from the professor’s lecture.
With this new experience, Mazur embarked on “peer instruction” and “interactive learning” in 1997, writing a manual on the former in the process. In 2007 he came up with a DVD on “interactive teaching,” produced by Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
Since then, he has delivered nearly 100 lectures on the subjects around the world.
Mazur found that through interactive learning, students gained three times in knowledge—as measured by conceptual tests and other assessment methods—compared to learning through the traditional lectures done at Harvard.
Another effect of interactive learning is erasing the gender gap between female and male undergraduates. “If you teach a traditional course, the gap just translates to: Men gain, women gain, but the gap remains rhe same,” Mazur said. “If you teach interactively, both gain more, but the women gain disproportionately more and close the gap.”
The best result of interactive learning is better retention of what has been discussed in the classroom. In the traditional lecture-based physics course, two months after taking the final exam, students are back to where they were before the course. Arriving at this finding, Mazur remarked: “It’s shocking.”
Many Harvard faculty members are now experimenting with different and innovative teaching styles and moving away from the hourlong-lecture mode of teaching.
With interactive learning shown to be superior to what is being done currently in most colleges and universities in the Philippines, we should convince school administrators as well as the Department of Education to redesign teaching methods.
I suggest that all teachers and school administrators learn more about how our students use iPads, tablets, and smartphones in their learning process. With these new tools we can experiment on interactive learning.
A common practice now is the “flipped” classroom, where students watch videos or PowerPoint presentations on an assigned topic in their dorm, and a few days later groups of them use their new knowledge in solving a problem of a family, community, or business organization, guided by a “sage on the side” substituting for the traditional “sage on the stage.”
Dr. Leonardo L. Leonidas (nonieleonidas68@ gmail.com) retired in 2008 as assistant clinical professor in pediatrics from Boston’s Tufts University School of Medicine, where he was recognized with a Distinguished Career in Teaching Award in 2009. A 1968 graduate of the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, he now spends some of his time in the province of Aklan.