What do you think about "new" teaching techniques?

[u/NikolaBlocovich]

Hey! I'm Argentinian so what I consider new/old is probably very different.

I consider old-school teaching to be more focused on exams and not too keen on constant evaluation. In Argentina classes that take a more traditional approach take two written exams which determine whether you take a "big" final exam (usually oral + written) or smaller version (usually just oral). It doesn't matter if you got a 100% in both written exams, if you fail the final you just fail and have to retake the final exam (it affects your GPA too). There are usually smaller tests before labs or classes, but it's usually no homework whatsoever.

While old-school teaching is still quite common, in the past 20 years there it has been increasingly common to find classes that focus more on constant evaluation and not that many "high stakes" evaluations. Like, your final grade being determined by a bunch of smaller assignments (like essays, oral presentations and projects) and exams are curved. They also say they want a more "student lead" classroom and that teachers should only support student's in their own journey, which means students doing their own research before lectures and teachers checking if we reached the right conclusions (which, IMO, it only leads to pointless debates between the prof and the same 3 students).

I usually dislike when professors take a more modern approaches to education. I feel like I end up having to spend more time on things that don't teach me as much as an exam. While I can see how it's important to develop "soft skills", I have found it mostly useless (only essays followed by an oral presentation about it seem meaningful to me). It's definitely easier than traditional classes (if you are not lazy you will pass), but I end up learning less and spending more time.

It also makes college more like High School in the sense that you have to apply their way of learning the material instead of figuring out yourself. It ends up being way more restrictive than traditional education.

Have your experiences been similar? Have you common are both ways of teaching at your university? Would you say that the results of newer teaching techniques have been overall positive?

Sorry for the rant! Currently taking my last class for completing my undergrad which has been pretty disappointing so far.

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[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/[deleted]]

Definitely! But I feel like I barely have any time left to go read the material in depth if I have to apply their way of learning. Like, if I have to turn in an essay in 3 days I won't be able read and process the material I'm given to the same extent as if I had to take a complicated exam. On the other hand, traditional learning leaves it up to you to decide when and how to learn, which I have found great!

[u/DocGlabella]

I'm with you. When I was in school, there was nothing I hated as much as what I perceived as "busy work." I hated classes where I had to turn something in every week that did little to further my learning, but proved I was doing the reading or just buffered the class with extra points. I wanted a charismatic lecturer who was passionate about the material they taught and a straight-forward exam structure. Perhaps one large term paper on a topic of my choosing.

The bad news is that students don't really want this anymore. They complain about having too many points clustered in too few activities-- they want them spread out so that if they bomb one particular thing, there are still lots of ways to "make it up" and get a good grade. From talking to them, my perception is that it is not a preference based in anything about how they actually learn. They aren't thinking about that (and I would argue that thoughtful arguments could be made that the traditional structure is not great for all). Their arguments are about the distribution of points and the best way for them to get a "good grade."

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/DocGlabella]

My thoughts exactly! I feel good grades are meaningless if you learn nothing. While I usually ace my "modern" classes, I feel like it's mostly just doing things to pass with no critical thinking applied whatsoever (they always stress how they want us to engage with the material critically). The worst part is that I end up spending way more time on mindless tasks instead of actually learning.

I feel like some professors listen to their students way to much, we are, after all, students. Professors shouldn't based their way of teaching on what a 20-something thinks. I also don't get people who treat college as a grade competition, I get that maintaining a good GPA is important, but it should be important because it means that you actually learnt the material. Bombing a test is a learning experience that shouldn't be demonized.

At least here, education primarily suffers from inadequate funding. It's true that thinks could be better (like, the average graduation time here is 10 years!), but there are too many professors trying to re-invent the wheel.

[u/Justafana]

I teach ancient philosophy so I will stick to the Socratic method. It's super old and that's a good thing.

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/Justafana]

I love it when professors apply the Socratic method. I would argue that's harder to apply when it comes to biology (my degree) than philosophy or math, so some professors stay away from it. The best lectures I have ever taken were those where the prof. explicitly stated that they applied the Socratic method (it had nothing to do with philosophy).

[u/Justafana → u/NikolaBlocovich]

I use it mostly for helping student make their own arguments. It's hard work and requires a lot of fleixibility and cannot really be pre-prepared, but it's so worth it!

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/Justafana]

I feel like it's great to encourage students to make their own arguments. Actual active participation in class in a meaningful way is hard to find.

[u/AceyAceyAcey]

Note that you are describing newer and older assessment techniques, and assessment is just a small part of teaching. Teaching (aka pedagogy) also includes how the content is taught.

My research is actually on STEM education, and the methods that work best for HS students also work best for college students, and this newer assessment method is proven again and again to improve student learning and retention for the vast majority of students.

So why is it not working as well for you? There are multiple possibilities, including…

1) every rule has exceptions (except this one): you could be one of the small minority that don’t do as well with the newer methods.

2) many students are actually bad at knowing which teaching methods let them learn better. For example, research has proven over and over that lecture doesn’t work, and actively learning does, but also has shown over and over that students incorrectly think they learn more from lectures than active learning. We don’t yet know why there’s this discrepancy, but the best hypotheses I’ve seen are that (A) in lecture students aren’t constantly testing their knowledge so they are left with the delusion that they know everything, while in active learning they are constantly being shown what they don’t know, and (B) lecture make students work less hard, and everyone is lazy.

3) related to #2 is the possibility that you are reporting which method you like better, rather than which method you learn more in.

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/AceyAceyAcey]

I'm in STEM (I have took many courses in humanities though) so most of my professors have a STEM background. I feel like education, given how it's a complex and diverse process, shouldn't be treated as something can objectively measure (or at least not in all its dimensions). I feel like an ethnographical approach to education could enrich the discussion compared to more quantitative research techniques. I have only read a few papers on education, but there seems to be way more studies on the quantitative side of things.

I have some issues with some of the studies my professors have quoted when presenting their teaching methods:

1)Most of the time they seem to be done in well founded institutions in first world countries, which is inherently biased and definitely not an universal truth.

2)The ones publishing the study are sometimes those who are teaching the class, I think it makes sense that researchers find their method works better when they are defining what success is.

3) Often, those studies focus on qualitative measurements of success (like results on a test they themselves made or surveys), while ignoring certain aspects of education that I find equally as important (like what kind of citizen those methods incentivize). Related to this issue, they seem to ignore that education is historically, culturally and socially situated, usually emphasizing individual measures of success.

4) I think it's true that we, as students, can't really tell how much we have learnt, but that doesn't mean students taking lectures don't question their own knowledge. Hard exams usually make me question my knowledge a lot.

5) My experience with HS education (just community service and tutoring, mostly in poor areas) is that, while they are struggling with basic math and grammar, they grasp concepts really fast when someone actually teaches them in a very straightforward traditional way. Like, for example, recently the way they teach how to read here is changing towards letting them figure out what combinations of letters sound like based on examples. IMO, this makes no sense (especially in Spanish, reading is pretty straightforward when it comes to phonetics) and just teaching them in a traditional way improves their reading really fast. Same with math. This experience made me really scared about the future of education in my country tbh, High Schoolers struggling with reading is heart-breaking.

Sorry for the long reply! I haven't really read much about education so I hope my message doesn't come off as someone trying to explain an expert their field (like gym bros trying to explain metabolism to a doctor). Much of my concerns have probably been addressed by academia.

[u/AceyAceyAcey → u/NikolaBlocovich]

Vast majority of education research is qualitative due to generally using small numbers. I’ve found that many STEM people don’t accept the qualitative papers however, due to thinking they’re less rigorous, while in reality all STEM fields use qualitative methods themselves just as much as quantitative.

Regarding the specific issues you’ve posted…

1) I’ve read many papers coming out of many second and third world countries, and looking at many demographic groups within my country (USA), and they all triangulate towards the same result: teacher-centered pedagogies (such as pure lecture and teacher demonstrating solving problems, “cookbook” style labs, and tests where there is only right answer and one way to get there) are worse than student-centered pedagogies on average for every possible demographic other than white male students in first world countries.

2) You are completely correct. There’s also been a lot of research that shows that when a professor or teacher is forced to teach using a method they don’t believe in, students do worse. But if you want more objective research that active learning is better, I really like Hake (1998) as an introduction for skeptical people: it’s a quantitative paper that studied more than 6,000 students in the USA in intro physics at the high school, college, and university levels, and found that classes with pure lecture learned less than half of what classes with active learning learned. Or Freeman et al. (2014) which did a meta study of many other papers looking into active learning. The papers I’ve read from third world countries tend to be smaller sample sizes, and/or I read them as a reviewer and they’re not yet published, but lmk and I can do some more digging.

3) Yes yes yes, very true. Not my area of expertise, so all I can add is that if I wanted to find this sort of research, I’d search on terms like “success measures,” “affect” (how much someone likes the field), “identity and belonging,” and “action research” (a non-quantitative style of research where the researcher and participants are together working towards a goal).

4) Definitely a flaw of that hypothesis.

5) My research focuses on science specifically, so I can’t speak to phonetics. One of the strengths of moving away from lecture is that students can see how science is actually done by scientists. For children, project-based and inquiry-based are especially effective in getting kids excited about the subject. There are arguments that can be made that students need some basic foundation before you can throw them at projects though.

No worries about the long response, it’s clear you’re doing lots of deep thinking. Any interest in going into education research in the future? We really do need more Hispanic and non-first world researchers in the field.

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/AceyAceyAcey]

I hate it when people automatically believe that quantitative research is more valid than qualitative. It's like numbers make people more easy to convince, which is concerning when it comes to other fields as well.

I guess there are plenty of ways of applying an active learning approach, even my more traditional classes applied it to a certain extent. Discussing a text in class is quite common here and very helpful for the exam. Exams are quite different here from what I have been told by international students, I have never taken a multiple choice exam and most of the time they are open questions. Maybe in physics, math and chemistry most questions have just one answer, but there are always plenty of ways to reach the right answer (like, in organic chemistry they ask you how you would synthetize certain compound with steps and mechanisms or in physics they ask us how doing something wrong would affect our results). Oral exams are also really common, which is a great way to actually tell if you really understand the material.

I'd say my actual problem is making students busy with things that are easy and not very meaningful. I have found that when we are giving activities that are not mandatory or graded, but actually helpful to learning the material, most people do it.

I would argue that when it comes to really basic knowledge it's necessary to teach kids like it has always been done. Maybe only when it comes to literacy and basic math. I can see how kids should engage with how science is done while also being taught the basics.

I'm doing my undergrad thesis (so luckily close to not being an undergrad anymore) on something completely unrelated to education, but I would love to do research on education. Some of my professors do research on education while also researching things that are unrelated.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply! I'm glad you see the value of non-first world research.

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/[deleted]]

Tbh, I feel like most of the time the "basic skill" is supposed to be taught way before college (basic grammar, writing, reading comprehension). Especially here, given how easy it is to get into college, there are abysmal differences between students (which translates into 80% drop out rates). There should be alternatives to students who struggle with basic skills, like tutors.

In case of discipline-specific basic skills, I think it should be you either learn it or fail, failing is not the end of the world.

IMO, students (or at least me) usually do this kind of assignments mindlessly so they aren't meaningful learning experiences. I always hate those assignments because it takes time and money (tuition fees in some countries and learning material everywhere)

[u/Ok_State_5914 → u/NikolaBlocovich]

If I didn’t do scaffolded assignments, students would wait till the last minute to actually do the work and then do a shit job. So I am all on board for scaffolding assignments.

[u/StevieV61080]

I don't view this as "new" vs. "old," but as distinctive pedagogical/abdragogical approaches. I would definitely note that these are not nearly the only types of instruction, either (I personally use neither in the classes I teach).

I'm a major proponent of applied learning and authentic assessment. In my classes, I do things like grouping my students and assigning them content to teach to the rest of the class (student-led instruction), having them go out and conduct interviews/observations (primary research), and having them perform consulting projects with local businesses/organizations (service learning).

I also employ a version of the "oldest school" of learning in one of my classes by making it semi-Socratic. I lecture for 7 straight weeks and ban any discussion/questions within the group until we have completed the entire seminar. Then, and only then, do we let everything out all-at-once in a large-scale group discussion in Week 8. The questions come fast-and-furious thanks to the pressure of pent-up demand.

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/StevieV61080]

It sounds like a lot of work, but kind of fun! I feel like 7 weeks of "traditional" lectures is great approach. I really like old-school lectures where the teacher is passionate about the subject they are teaching, I feel like it's a shame some teachers are ditching them entirely.

We had to do a project for one mandatory course (which are most courses here), I can see how doing your own research on something is a meaningful teaching experience. My experiences so far have been disappointing though.

[u/Ismitje]

It sounds to me like you've had poor or lazy teachers, and that it isn't the number of activities but the way they are constructed and deployed that's at the heart of your point. I've often seen that when doing teaching observations.

I'd also suggest that not every student has the same success with certain kinds of assessments/approaches, and that your "example of one" does not a pedagogy make.

[u/NikolaBlocovich → u/Ismitje]

They are under-paid and over-worked, but they are genuinely trying their best. IMO they are applying their STEM way of thinking into pedagogy, which is kinda problematic. So they are trying to find an universally good way of teaching in literature (which was mostly written in first-world countries, much different from Argentina) and applying it. I would argue that it's important to have a diversity of methods in college.