When I was a professor (natural sciences) I decided to play around with different learning systems to see what worked best. I discovered the obvious that learning depth is negatively correlated with the student evaluation of their lecturer during the course and positively correlated a year later (students hate learning when they do it, but love the subject so much later that they choose your next course the following year because they learnt so much).
The more useful thing I discovered was getting the students to read the lecture notes before a lecture boosted the class average by 10% points. 10 minutes spent reading the lecture notes before the lecture and answering a few simple online multiple choice questions about the lecture was surprisingly effectively at improving learning. My assumption is it cut down on the novelty overload effect where the student’s brains shut down mid-lecture and so they were able to get more out of the lectures.
> AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It's like the book club from hell.
>> Not just AWS- that's an Amazon-wide technique. And it's freaking amazing. You should try it.
I half wonder if in lecture format, a silent 60 minute reading session would be more productive. Lecturer is available to answer questions but other than that the textbook is the guide.
Interesting approach. The difficulty, of course, lies in how to get students to actually read the lecture notes, aka do their homework, but the principle seems sound enough to me.
In one of the classes I’ve taught we had a similar approach where we had students do a homework assignment beforehand where they would encounter the very problem that he material in the lecture would address. It did seem to make the students who actually did their homework more attentive.
The way I did it was by having an online quiz (three questions) that they could answer from just reading the lecture notes. I would only give access to each quiz a couple of nights before the lecture block was started (4-6 lectures) and they had to complete each mini quiz before the first lecture in the block.
Rather pathetically admin made me change this approach after a couple of years to two large quiz’s because I was testing the students “too much”. 3 quick questions every week was too much, but 30 long questions every 6 weeks was OK even if it didn’t get the students to read the notes.
The more useful thing I discovered was getting the students to read the lecture notes before a lecture boosted the class average by 10% points. 10 minutes spent reading the lecture notes before the lecture and answering a few simple online multiple choice questions about the lecture was surprisingly effectively at improving learning. My assumption is it cut down on the novelty overload effect where the student’s brains shut down mid-lecture and so they were able to get more out of the lectures.