Moore Foundation grantee and Nobel laureate Carl Wieman recently discussed his passion for active learning, an antidote to sleep-inducing monologues typical of large college lectures.
Wieman prefers to get students actively engaged with course material in smaller groups. These techniques have become known as an evidence-based, "active learning" style of teaching.
"You give people lectures, and [some students] go away and learn the stuff. But it wasn't that they learned it from lecture — they learned it from homework, from assignments. When we measure how little people learn from an actual lecture, it's just really small," Wieman says.
He believes that until administrators and faculty leaders prioritize teaching, schools will continue to shortchange undergraduates.
"The quality of teaching is not something that university administrators are rewarded for, and correspondingly know or care about," Wieman says. "Improving education is a profoundly important issue in the modern world. There are a lot of really hard problems that you don't know how to solve. And this is one I and many others do know how to solve."
Read the full article here and a follow-up with Wieman here.
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