Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

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You should know that "what students like" and "what constitutes effective instruction" can be very different.

https://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-...

The simplest description is this: Consider two videos. One is a clear lecture (eg Khan Academy style), while the other is a dialogue between a character who espouses the common misperception, and a teacher who illustrates their mistakes. After watching the videos, you have students evaluate how well they think they know the material, how they feel about the video, and then you test them on how well they learned the concept covered by the video.

The lecture video had the following results: - Highly rated video clarity - Increased confidence in knowledge - zero change in knowledge (tested)

That is to say, students liked the video and thought they learned something, but didn't actually learn anything.

The dialogue video, on the other hand, was almost the opposite: - video was considered confusing (not at all clear) - decreased confidence in knowledge - large positive change in knowledge (tested)

Students, it would seem, don't know enough to be able to evaluate what is good instruction. (cf Dunning & Kruger)

I think you are right. But I haven't seen anywhere near a consensus that active learning constitutes an improvement. The reason large academic institutions are moving in this direction is because they are threatened by MOOCs and because administrators are often trained at business schools who love this learning style, mainly because most the content in business school is beside the point anyway.

I'm going to have to disagree. Here's my default article I turn to on the matter - http://www.npr.org/2012/01/01/144550920/physicists-seek-to-l... .

The problem, up until the advent of MOOCs, was there was no incentive for higher education to improve. Prices go up every year, more instruction is dumped on post-docs and adjuncts instead of professors, but the number of people going to college continues to increase. Why improve your product if people keep buying it regardless?

And this idea of active learning is nothing new. Maria Montessori did extensive research on effective teaching methods more than a hundred years ago and moved more and more heavily to small projects and physical interaction as the most effective means of instruction.

http://www.infomontessori.com/sensorial/visual-sense-binomia...

I happen to like the binomial cube as an example, because it takes a confusing, "just memorize FOIL" type of concept and turns it into something you can directly interact with to develop a much clearer understanding.

And of course, there's things like this: https://xkcd.com/1356/

Or the explorable explanation that was on the front page the other day about game theory and trust: http://ncase.me/trust/

Or Brett Victor's classic Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

The ability to interact with a model blows traditional educational methods out of the water as far as gaining serious understanding (imo), and I expect this type of instruction to only grow in importance as time goes on.

> ability to interact with a model blows traditional educational methods out of the water as far as gaining serious understanding

One nice thing about VR/AR for education, is that different media have different "it's natural" styles of use, and for XR, that's hands-on physical manipulation of models.

I keep a notebook with a list of references on pedagogy, including active learning:

https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/pedagogy.html

The Peer Instruction section features a great deal of research in introductory physics courses, where well-implemented active learning methods can double or triple student learning of core concepts. (I also blogged about this research long ago: https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2012-10-19-shutup.html)

Students in intro physics classes tend to memorize the formulas but don't have any conceptual understanding, and active learning seems to dramatically improve the conceptual understanding without harming the ability to solve typical calculate-the-force problems.

Happy to discuss or send PDFs if you're not able to obtain them. My email is in my profile.

The physics courses that I have been involved in, both as a student and in an instructional capacity, used several modes of instruction. Active learning was one, but lectures were certainly another.

The point of lectures were to lay the groundwork for the active learning component. Without that foundation, the students would have been forced to find other means to acquire background knowledge.

Like reading a book or watching a video? The point of a lot of "flip the classroom" strategies (roughly a superset of the "active learning" ones) is precisely that there are many ways other than lecture of acquiring background knowledge. That's certainly how we pick things up if we aren't in a classroom. So why waste classroom time on lectures if you can find other means of acquiring background knowledge?

tl;dr:

> Without that foundation, the students would have been forced to find other means to acquire background knowledge.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Yes, like reading a book or watching a video.

While those are fine modes for learning, lectures do have the benefit of being a social mode of learning. Even in the extreme case of a lecturer who is playing the role of a sage on the stage, students still have access to other students. In less extreme cases, students still have access to the lecturer and the lecturer has the opportunity to include different instructional strategies. In other words, the benefits and drawbacks of lectures largely depend upon the attitudes of the instructor and students.

Both of those are lectures, though. One is just presented in an interesting format. It reminds me of studies on the efficacy of highlighting your textbook as read it: it only works when you just start out, but once the novelty wears off, so does its effectiveness.

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