Why Use Interactive Lectures?
Lecturing is a time-honored teaching technique that is an efficient method to present information but may result in students who listen passively. Making lectures interactive by including short activities can foster active engagement and enhance the value of the lecture segments by:
- Engaging students in the material during class.
- Giving everyone in the class time to answer a question, solve a problem, or interpret a diagram.
- Allowing more than one person to be successful.
- Enabling students to practice thinking and talking in geoscience terms.
- Giving you an opportunity to see if students have learned a concept before presenting a different concept or giving them an exam or a quiz.
Using activities that allow all of the students to participate, instead of having individual students answer questions when called on, will promote student retention of more of the material presented during lecture, give students practice in developing critical-thinking skills, and enable you to assess how well the class is learning that day.
Research on Learning
Hake, 1998 compared pre- and post-course test results for 6000 students from high school and university physics courses, and found significantly more improvement in students in courses that used interactive-engagement methods (including classes over 100 students) than in those that did not.
Classes that don't use interactive-engagement methods still allow students to ask questions and still involve asking individual students questions. Why isn't that enough? The problem is that they involve only one student at a time (often a small set of students over and over again) and that students rarely ask questions in class (Graesser and Person, 1994 ). Passive students will not check to see if they do understand the material.
Wenzel, 1999 reviewed research on college lectures and reported that the longer the lecture, the less of the material ended up in the students' notes (see figure linked to the thumbnail at the left). Interactive classes commonly involve breaking up the lecture, effectively giving multiple short lectures, presumably with a higher percentage of material being retained from each. He also reported that a class that used a think-pair-share technique for two-three minutes for every 12-18 minutes of lecture remembered more of the lecture material directly after the class and twelve days later than the control class that heard the same lecture without the think-pair-share breaks.
