Teaching Methods in Science

From the Economist:

Dr Deslauriers’s lab rats were a group of 850 undergraduate engineering students taking a compulsory physics course. The students were split into groups at the start of their course, and for the first 11 weeks all went to traditionally run lectures given by well-regarded and experienced teachers. In the 12th week, one of the groups was switched to a style of teaching known as deliberate practice, which inverts the traditional university model. Class time is spent on problem-solving, discussion and group work, while the absorption of facts and formulae is left for homework. Students were given reading assignments before classes. Once in the classroom they spent their time in small groups, discussing specific problems, with the teacher roaming between groups to offer advice and respond to questions.

After the jump, a graph and more of the article…

At the end of the test week, Dr Deslauriers surveyed the students and gave them a voluntary test (sold as useful exam practice, and marked on a 12-point scale) to see how much they had learned in that week and what they thought of the new teaching method. The results were striking (see chart). The traditionally taught group’s average score was 41%, compared with 74% for the experimental group—even though the experimental group did not manage to cover all the material it was supposed to, whereas the traditional group did….

Still, Dr Deslauriers and his team are bullish about the wider implications of their work, which adds to the evidence that it may be possible to improve on the long-established chalk-and-talk method. And the students seemed to enjoy the experience, too. Attendance in the experimental group rose by 20% over the course of the week that deliberate practice was used, and three-quarters of its members said that they would have learned more had the entire course been taught in the same way. In this case, then, the educational hippies may have been right.