Research shows lecturing can be the best thing—when the students are cognitively primed for it.

Here’s a good article:

“A Time For Telling”

ABSTRACT

Suggestions for improving text understanding often prescribe activating prior knowledge,

a prescription that may be problematic if students do not have the relevant prior

knowledge to begin with. In this article, we describe research about a method for developing

prior knowledge that prepares students to learn from a text or lecture. We

propose that analyzing contrasting cases can help learners generate the differentiated

knowledge structures that enable them to understand a text deeply. Noticing the distinctions

between contrasting cases creates a "time for telling"; learners are prepared

to be told the significance of the distinctions they have discovered. In three classroom

studies, college students analyzed contrasting cases that consisted of simplified experimental

designs and data from classic psychology experiments. They then received

a lecture or text on the psychological phenomena highlighted in the experiments.

Approximately 1 week later, the students predicted outcomes for a

hypothetical experiment that could be interpreted in light of the concepts they had

studied. Generating the distinctions between contrasting cases and then reading a text

or hearing a lecture led to more accurate predictions than the control treatments of (a)

reading about the distinctions between the cases and hearing a lecture, (b) summarizing

a relevant text and hearing a lecture, and (c) analyzing the contrasting cases twice

without receiving a lecture. We argue that analyzing the contrasting cases increased

students' abilities to discern specific features that differentiated classes of psychological

phenomena, much as a botanist can distinguish subspecies of a given flower. This

differentiated knowledge prepared the students to understand deeply an explanation

of the relevant psychological principles when it was presented to them. These results

can inform constructivist models of instruction as they apply to classroom activities

and learning from verbal materials. In particular, the results indicate that there is a

place for lectures and readings in the classroom if students have sufficiently differentiated

domain knowledge to use the expository materials in a generative manner.

Schwartz, Daniel L. and Bransford, John D.(1998) 'A Time For Telling', Cognition and Instruction, 16: 4, 475 — 5223

-M

Michael Sweet, Ph.D.

Director of Instructional Development, Center for Teaching and Learning

MAI 2206  |  Mail Stop G2100  |  (512) 232-1775  |  http://ctl.utexas.edu

From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim Sibley
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 2:45 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Didactic Lecture

my two cents

still lecturing is still important

but it important WHY you do it....is it is response to student needs or questions?

and it is important HOW much you do.....small mini-lectures interspersed in activities is likely something to aim for

there are no definitive rules here

I have faculty who almost never lecture in their TBL courses and faculty who will on occasion give a 50 minute lecture (usually on a topic they couldn't figure out how to TBL)

JIm

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Carson, Ron <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

As I'm plugging forward, trying to wrap my head around TBL, I have a simple question. Does TBL include traditional didactic lecture or is all learning done in teams? For example, currently my gerontology course has the following 6 modules.  In totality, these modules should adequately prepare students to successfully participate in a 1 week clinical education geriatric setting.  So, in TBL does all the education come from team interactions?

Understand Successful Aging
Understand Normal Aging
Understand Impairment to  Normal Aging
Understand special topics
Understand Assessments
Understand Treatment Settings

Thanks,

Ron Carson MHS, OT
Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences
Orlando, Fl

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Jim Sibley
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