Science reporter Jeffrey Mervis writes about a new study suggesting that college students may learn better through — surprise! — an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.
The study, by a team at the University of British Columbia led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman, that students in the "deliberate" practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as did those in the control section. The research also showed that students were also more engaged and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.
The New York Times reporter Benedict Carey points out that study is far from perfect: "More than 150 of the students were absent from the test, most of them from the comparison class. The researchers had no way to know how those students, if they'd come, would have changed the overall findings."
Experts said, according to Carey, that it was "problematic" for a study to offer an intervention (in the form of enthusiastic teachers) that could sway results. "This is not a good idea, since they know exactly what the hypotheses are that guide the study, and, more importantly, exactly what the measures are that will be used to evaluate the effects," James W. Stigler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They might, therefore, be tailoring their instruction to the assessment — i.e., teaching to the test."
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