In class, we were asked if lectures would help us understand the material better. I looked around online and found that the teaching community has a lot to say about this subject. Specifically, I found a paper concerning undergraduate classes and the debate between discussion/lecture style learning, with the control being students in lecture and the experiment being a discussion-centric learning model. The study in question (linked below) found that the discussion group was more attentive and interested in the class overall, but the lecture group did slightly better on tests.
A general overview of the pros and cons of both lectures and discussions is also linked below. The conclusion of this overview seems to be that different students have different learning styles and that while those students who learn aurally, by listening, tend to do better in lecture, students who learn better with a more hands-on approach find lectures boring and appear to benefit far more from a discussion section. The consensus seems to be that a dual lecture/discussion teaching model is in order; while a teacher prompting a discussion (interactive learning predominantly between students) might garner a better picture of how well the class has understood the material, a teacher lecturing (taken in this sense to mean less instructor-student interaction, more a data dump) ensures that a certain necessary amount of information has been transferred. Which is more important – making sure the students really understand the material or stimulating their curiosity and intellectual thought-processes by making them figure it out for themselves?
This is a tricky question; the only example I can think of in favor of the lecture model is that of a physics class. The teacher lectures, describing the discoveries of such scientists as Newton or Einstein – discoveries no one would expect the students to make on their own. Then the teacher assigns homework to get the students to think about how to apply these discoveries – and there are many more applications than there are discoveries – and the students work collaboratively in discussion sections to figure out the problems. Clearly, this example is in favor of a duality as well, but its applicability to an English class might be limited; there are no end-of-chapter problem sets in our poetry anthologies, making effective use of the duality just a little bit harder.
If we are just told what is right and what is wrong about a poem, or how to think about it, sure… we understand – in the same way a student who copies a physics
problem from a solution key “understands” the problem: not very well, and not for long. If we attempt to puzzle it out for ourselves, there are two possible end-results: either we truly get it, or we fail to make the necessary conceptual leaps. This is the quandary – should a teacher aim for meaningful understanding or short-term comprehension, and how can a balance be reached?
Overview: http://kendrik2.wordpress.com/2007/09/05/lecture-vs-whole-group-discussion/
Specific Study: http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED136741&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED136741
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I particularly agree with the point that was made about students learning habits. Some students learn better by listening, while some learn more effectively when they actually do something. Those that learn better will do better in classes based on lecture, and those that learn by doing will have to catch up by themselves actively relearning the material presented in lecture. I understand that catering to each student is impossible. However, an English class is not based on abstract concepts that need to be lectured on, as in a math or physics class. I think the point of English is for the students to decide between themselves whats going on, without someone else providing the answers.
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