Jeff Sandefer, a new colleague and educational entrepreneur from Texas, referred me to this report from NPR. The account illustrates the promise and the danger of terms like “on line education of” or “interactive learning.”
The promise is very real. Watson and, later Skinner, demonstrated all of this in the sixties. Their work was called “machine based learning” or “operant conditioning.”
Unlike the anecdotal approach touted by NPR, Skinner’s work used strict scientific controls. He needed to eliminate what I call the”gimmick effect. ” Any new gimmick will work until students adapt and get bored. Actually, as a student in Skinner’s class , the most impressive thing was that I learned even though the machine based instruction was VERY boring.
These tools work. The danger comes when advocates of the tools throw out the huge value added by exposure to a Professor like Skinner or, in the article below, Ben Lewin of MIT. “Interactive learning”does not replace the huge value of interacting with someone who knows more than I do or is smarter than I am. As students in Skinner’s class, the machine based learning allowed us to — USE our knowledge and interact with Skinner and the TAs in lectures and discussions. Dr. Skinner. was VERY involved!
The real goal, it seems to me, is to provide the tools to great professors. Berkeley has secured funding to do just that. It is all too easy for legislators to imagine that online education will lower their costs in a magical way.
A terrible example is the claim by Western Governors University to be able to replace faculty with mentors with no knowledge of the subject matter. Worse yet, WGU is touting its approach a an ideal way t train high school teachers!
from NPR May 12, 2011 (excerpted) Who’s better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls.
A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching.
He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.
The interactive method had almost no lecturing. It involved short, small-group discussions, in-class “clicker” quizzes, demonstrations and question-answer sessions. The teachers got real-time graphic feedback on what the students were learning and what they weren’t getting.
Beichner, who uses the more hands-on method himself, likened it to the difference between being told how to ride a bike vs. getting on and riding it.
The classes’ test scores were nearly identical before the interactive sessions, but there was an obvious difference after the students took a 12-question quiz on what they were taught during the experimental week of instruction. Students in the interactive class got an average of 74 percent of the questions right, while those taught using traditional method scored only 41 percent.
The best scores in the traditional class were below average for the interactive class, Wieman said. In addition, student attendance and attention were higher in the interactive class.
Wieman said the need for a more hands-on teaching approach isn’t an indictment of a generation raised on video games. It has more to do with the way the brain learns, he said. This method has long worked well in individual tutoring; it’s just now being applied on a grander scale, he said.
As far as professorial brilliance, there’s “nothing magical about a particular person,” he said.
“Lectures have been equally ineffective for centuries,” the Nobelist said. “Now we have figured out ways to do it better.”
———
Online: http://www.sciencemag.org