Despite his best efforts and long hours, Nobel-Prize winning physicist and professor Carl Wieman grew frustrated by his inability to teach and his students' failure to learn.
In a traditional classroom, the teacher stands at the front of the class explaining what is clear in their mind to a group of passive students.
Yet this pedagogical strategy doesn't positively impact retention of information from lecture, improve understanding basic concepts, or affect beliefs (that is, does new information change your belief about how something works).
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Alison Gopnik says, "I don't think there's any scientist who thinks the way we typically do university courses has anything to do with the best methods for getting people to learn. "
Given that lectures were devised as a means of transferring knowledge from one to many, it seems obvious that we would ensure that people retain the information they are consuming.
Wieman mentions three studies, the last of which perfectly emphasizes the disturbing point that passive lectures do not seem to work.
Wieman argues these results are likely generic and make a lot of sense if you consider the extremely limited capacity of short-term memory.
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The results were similarly disturbing when students were tested to determine understanding of basic concepts. More instruction wasn't helping students advance from novice to expert. In fact, the data indicated the opposite: students had more novice-like beliefs after they completed a course than they had when they started.
We're left with a puzzle about teaching. The teachers, unquestionably experts in their subjects, are not improving the learning outcomes: Students are not learning the concepts. How can this be?
Research on learning provides some answers. (Emphasis added.)
This reminds me a lot of what Charlie Munger said on mental models:
Students are not learning the basic concepts that enable experts rely on to organize and apply information. And they are not being aided in developing the mental framework — the latticework — they need to improve retrieval and application of knowledge. "So it makes perfect sense," Wieman writes, "that they are not learning to think like experts, even though they are passing science courses by memorizing facts and problem-solving recipes."
So what are a few examples of these strategies, and how do they reflect our increasing understanding of cognition? Here's Wieman:
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