Lecturers spend most of their preparation time on what they will say: tightening the script, sharpening an analogy, timing a slide. Race and Brown (1998) argue this misses the point. Learning depends on five things happening inside the student: wanting to learn something, needing it, doing something with it, getting feedback, and digesting what that feedback means, and none of the five is delivered by talking, however well.
The evidence for the doing stage is now hard to dispute. Freeman et al. (2014) found that active learning raised examination scores by roughly six per cent across 225 studies in science and engineering, and nearly halved failure rates, an effect that held regardless of class size. There is a catch worth naming honestly: Deslauriers et al. (2019) found that students who learned more through active methods often felt they had learned less than those who sat through a polished lecture.
Redesigning a large-group session around the five processes means building in a short doing task, a planned feedback moment, and a written question that forces students to digest what just happened, and warning them, in advance, that the discomfort is not a sign of failure.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.