The "Standard" Lecture: Are the Current Forms of Lectures Really the Most Effective?

Ryan Kerns

The standard lecture style in most American colleges today involves a single professor lecturing to a class that can get as large as 250-300 students. Unfortunately, these large lecture sizes are synonymous with freshmen classes where students sometimes have problems adjusting to the large class sizes and the different style of teaching. In high school, these students were in classes of 15-25 kids where teachers usually had an interactive teaching style and they could have plenty of personal time with the teacher if needed. However, when a college professor just stands in the front and talks to the class for 90 minutes, it doesn’t leave much room for interaction or questions. This leads to the question, “how effective is the standard lecture style?” This subject has been long debated and usually to no avail. Many professors argue that lecturing is the only way to teach that many students. However, many students counter-argue that they don’t get personal time with the professor that they need in order to truly learn the material and pass the exams. E J Tonkes, P S Isaac, and V Scharaschkin wrote in their article titled Assessment of an Innovative System of Lecture Notes in First-year Mathematics, “Students complain that the old-fashioned lecture style of copying notes from a board hinders the learning process, as they simply concentrate on writing.” They go on to explain how professors have tried to solve this by printing out notes for the students, but this usually leads to little class attendance and participation. Unfortunately, college tests are extremely tough in that they require kids to apply the things that they were supposed to have learned in lecture and apply them to different types of problems. Professors have to start wondering whether or not the standard for of lecturing is the most effective when some test averages are down in the fifties.