Editorial: New teaching methods would improve lectures

If you walk into a statistics or math class in 120 David Lawrence Hall, you will hardly find a bastion of learning.

It’s far more likely you will only find dazed students, blankly staring at PowerPoint slides, motionless as a professor drones to nobody.

This model of education is a waste of everybody’s time; teacher and student are both being forced into a system that takes no advantage of natural human sociology or psychology.

Students have no method of using social networks to foster higher motivations and understanding. Students, too, are robbed of one of the greatest teaching tools: trying to teach subject matter to other students. Nor do lectures provide an opportunity for instant feedback.

In 1990, 2000 or even 2008, there was no way to get around these drawbacks. Professors were still the best vessels of information. Students in lecture halls were still the most effective receptors of information. There was no way to organize a system of learning to take advantage of social learning, teaching-as-learning or instant feedback.

However, some experimental learning methods being used in Harvard Professor Gary King’s statistics class are showing that, in 2013, it is possible to transform the way we learn.

Many of the programs are similar to innovations that have been developing through online education providers such as Coursera.org. Detailed videos, with an accompanied running text of student questions and answers to specific points raised, allow students to learn material before lectures.

These methods are better than 36 PowerPoint slides on the IS/LM model in macroeconomics. These methods are actual learning materials that enable a student to learn.

But most interesting is how King uses smartphones as integrated teaching tools.

At the beginning of classes, difficult conceptual questions are sent to phones. Students are automatically sorted into groups of two to five people, using an algorithm that tracks previous group performance and social interaction to create groups that are maximally productive; students with histories of good group performance (over all classes) are mixed with other students.

Then, with all students placed into groups, class discussion consists of each member attempting to convince others that his or her answer is correct. They try to teach the material to each other. Because students are also matched based on personality characteristics collected at the beginning of the semester, there is a social element to these interactions that makes discussion lively.

Finally, all students answer again. Typically, a question where only 20 percent of students were initially correct now sees rates around 80 percent.

Instantaneous feedback, teaching as learning and social learning — it can all happen in a lecture hall. The fact that it doesn’t happen in David Lawrence 121 or 120 should make us all sad.

Even if Ivy League students do tend to be top performers in high school, this kind of stimulation would be welcomed even at a more modest school like Pitt. Nothing else would help more to end the stifling silence of large lectures and general student anti-enthusiasm for these large classes. We are crying out for some energy.

And while there is an element of top-down character predestination in assigning groups through these programs to be maximally productive (Who did the computer say was the smart one? Or the slacker?), this shouldn’t be too big of a problem. After all, the alternative is often mindless Words With Friends games or counting rectangles on the wall.

Lecture culture must change if higher education is to remain a relevant part of the future. The tools being used at Harvard should be part of the solution at Pitt and all other top research universities.