Learning through lectures is inefficient, scientists say

Students who listened to regular lectures are 55% more likely to fail the exam than those who participated in the discussion of the material, even if in minimal form. These are the results of a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

The first universities were founded in Western Europe in the middle of the 11th century. Since then, for almost a thousand years, giving lectures to an audience has remained the main form of teaching teaching material. But many teachers believe that learning becomes more effective when students are involved in active work: group work, answers to questions.

To determine whether such an opinion was valid, Scott Freeman of the University of Washington and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 225 scientific works on the teaching of the natural sciences (STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
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The results clearly support the active learning methods. In groups with regular lectures, the exam was not passed, on average, 34% of students, and in groups with active learning, only 22%.



Considering that the natural sciences are studied by about 7 million people in the USA alone, due to incorrect teaching methods, 840 thousand more students will leave educational institutions (2.38 million will not master the course of study instead of 1.54 million).

Even schools are gradually moving to active learning, while conservative universities still adhere to millennial traditions.

The authors carefully approached the choice of scientific papers. A total of 642 papers are devoted to this topic, but only 225 were selected for the meta-analysis - those that meet the standards put forward: the same preparation of compared groups of students, the same teachers, exams are either the same or conducted on the same group of questions. This is the most comprehensive and comprehensive study ever conducted on this topic.


The graph shows the number of studies selected for the meta-analysis for each subject. The horizontal axis in diagram B is the percentage, as the number of those who did not pass the exam on this subject decreases when using active learning methods. Horizontal bars represent 95% probability limits.

“This is a really important article - I get the impression that it’s almost unethical to lecture if you are familiar with this information,” said Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has opposed lecturing for 27 years and is not involved in the preparation of the mentioned scientific work. “It's nice to see such a coherent picture — an abundance of evidence that lecturing is outdated, old-fashioned and ineffective.”