Effectiveness of the Lecture-Discussion model comes from three sources:
Schema Theory
Def. Schema theory is a theoretical view of knowledge construction that says that the information people store in memory consists of networks of organized and interconnected ideas, relationships, and procedures.
The interconnected ideas, relationships, and procedures are called schemata (singular form is schema.
Begins with philosophy Kant who described the mind as actively using existing knowledge to guide perception and categorize information.
Psychologist F.C. Bartlett wrote in the 30's did some interesting research on the processes involved in remembering information from written pasages. He found that subjects remembered different parts of stories and that they interpreted them stories based on their own frames of reference changing the facts to make them fit. Over time, distortions of the stories increased but were invariably linked to the way that information was meaningful to the subjects. He concluded that people have a strong drive to make sense of what they encounter.
Students enter a class with widely varying beliefs, attitudes, and background knowledge and bring diversa schemata. They can read the same material and interpret it quite differently.
So, schemata have 3 major characteristics:
The process of learning can be thought of as the development of schemata that allow individuals to understand and function in their world.
Meaningful Verbal Learning
David Ausubel, a psychologist wrote a book in 1963 stressing the important of cognitive structures on learning.
His def. of meaningful verbal learning is as follows:
Meaningful verbal learning is the acquisition of ideas that are linked to other ideas.
This is in contract to rote learning, which emphasizes the memorization of specific items of information rather than exploring relationships within the material.
Meaningful learning occurs when the ideas in a new schema are connected not only to each other but to previously established schemata as well.
One of the most prominent ideas from Ausubel's work is the concept of advance organizers.
Advance organizers are verbal statements at the beginning of a lesson that preview and structure the new material and link it to the students' existing schemata.
Advance organizers act like road maps. Effective advance organizers:
An example from a lesson introducing the research process:
Research is a creative process involving time for reflection and gestation. It is iterative; what you learn as you proceed may cause you to go back and rethink what you did earlier.The first stage in research is to pick a topic and to use that topic to explore the literature on a very broad scale in preliminary fashion (the second stage). What you learn as you explore the topic allows you to move to the third stage of focus formulation. Once you have a focused topic you can search the literature more specifically for relevant and useful material (the 4th stage). The knowledge you gain from the your reading of the literature (the 5th stage) allows you to put it into a useful form to present to others (the 6th and final stage).
In our class today we will explicate this model in more detail and focus on the first two stages; our next class will emphasize the 3rd and 4th stages. You will do the final stages in your subject class with your teacher.
As you see from the example, the advance organizer provides a framework for new content and prepares the student for what will follow. The exact form an advance organizer takes depends on:
Active Learner Involvement
The third principle that increases the effectiveness of the Lecture-Discussion Model is involvement of students through teacher questioning.
Lectures are popular because:
But they have two problems:
McKeachie reports on the research literature on the ineffectiveness of lecture as a teaching method. In seven studies comparing lecture to discussion, discussion was superior in all seven on measures of retention and higher-order thinking. It was also superior in almost all cases on measures of student attitude and motivation.
The steps in planning a lecture-discussion lesson are as follows: