Folks,

The following is taken from an email message sent by Ed Davidson,
another faculty member in our department.  Use it in good health.

Cheers,
-brian

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My information comes from a time almost a quarter century ago
(literally!), when I was on the CoE Policy and Planning Committee at
Illinois. We were concerned about rapidly increasing lecture class
sizes (due to sudden unparalleled student preference for a few
particular majors), whether this was compromising the quality of the
education we delivered, and what we might do about it.

The motivation there at that time was concern about improving or at
least maintaining "quality". So our committee, although we had little
faith that we would learn anything useful from this exercise, called
in an expert from the equivalent of CRLT here. To our amazement, he
really laid it out for us. I have remembered his most valuable words
and drawn on them time and time again over the past quarter century.

He began by noting that he was well aware that engineers had nothing but
contempt for schools of education and the methods "research" that is
done there. "BUT", he said, "there have been many many studies by many
researchers at many institutions under a very wide variety of different
assumptions and different metrics ... AND they have ALL come up with the
same following conclusions:

1. LISTENING TO LECTURES is THE LEAST EFFECTIVE means of delivering
learning, closely followed by READING TEXTBOOKS. This is not to say that
there are not great lecturers and great textbooks -- but statistically
the overall amount of learning (however you measure that) per hour spent
in lecture is the lowest of a wide number of possible delivery methods,
with hours spent reading textbooks (or staring at an open textbook)
being a close second in ineffectiveness. What's the problem? It's too
easy to disengage, not to be really there -- the material encountered
may not relate to what the student is concerned about or capable of
understanding at the moment it is delivered, so the student may not be
open to that material at that time -- etc. So, what is most effective?

2. Two things are far and away most correlated with effective learning.
And so much so, that whatever comes third is so far below these two that
it is almost irrelevant. And these are

-- HOURS per week spent "AT TASK" (i.e. actively engaged in learning the
content of the intended subject), and

-- the QUALITY AND IMMEDIACY OF FEEDBACK provided to the student ON
HIS/HER OWN CREATIVE IDEAS (like wouldn't it be better to do it this
way, or what's wrong with doing it this way?).