Are Lectures Necessary

A mid much concern about the need for change in jHL higher education (e.g., Goulet, 1968) a major source of friction between students and "the establish ment" seems to derive from the fact that our society is committed to a goal of mass education while many stu dents want individual contact with faculty members. It seems apparent that these joint goals cannot be achieved by relying on educational practices such as lec ture, which exist today for largely irrelevant reasons. As a form of information dissemination, lectures may be appropriate for presenting material which is not avail able in written form, or for material to be presented only once, and hence not worth publishing. Neither of these conditions holds for most of undergraduate education. Yet the lecture remains. It has not been shown to be inferior. Many studies of variations in teaching tech niques support a general conclusion that there is no measurable difference among methods of teaching when evaluated by the one criterion of student performance on final examinations. (Dubin and Taveggia, 1968, p. 35). A possible exception to this conclusion may exist in the ?instruction procedures described by Keller (1968), but even here, examination data were the focal criteria. Without downgrading content in any way, one can make a case for the use of additional criteria in evalu ating teaching procedures (e.g. Rogers, 1969). The present study was designed to investigate several meth ods of instruction using as criteria examination per formance, voluntary attendance, and students' evaluative ratings and by considering relationships among these criterion variables. Subjects were all regularly scheduled students en rolled in the undergraduate Abnormal Psychology course taught by the author during four consecutive quarters excluding the summer quarter. The sample sizes for each quarter are given below, and are based on the number of students taking the midterm examination. Each quarter a limit of 75 students was set by the in structor, but up to 15 of the students closed out of the course who were seniors were permitted to enroll. In no quarter did as many as 15 such students petition to en roll. In each quarter a few students dropped the course after having been enrolled. The study contained four treatment conditions, each consisting of procedures used during a particular one quarter undergraduate course in Abnormal Psychology. According to the formal description of the course, there were to be 2 one-hour lecture periods per week plus a one-hour recitation period. Recitations were conducted in several groups of 15-20 students, each meeting once a week with a post-internship level graduate student in clinical psychology. The recitation sections were con ducted according to the desires of their individual in structors, consistent with the goals of the lecture part of the course, but not dictated by those goals. Grades for recitation were the sole responsibility of the recitation instructor and constituted one-fourth of the course grade. The procedures described in the present paper refer only to the lecture part of the course. In the first two quarters (A and B), the course was taught accord ing to a standard lecture format. The instructor lectured from notes and answered questions when asked. Though questions arose in essentially every lecture period, the focus of the class meetings was clearly on the lecture, and student participation in the course was largely pas sive, or "elicited" (e.g., Rogers, 1969, p. 35). In these two quarters the experimental conditions which were to be used in the subsequent two quarters (C and D) were not generated until after the midterm examination of quarter A. During the second "lecture" quarter (B), then, E had formulated the conditions to follow, and even though every effort was made to present a "nor mal" lecture course, bias was obviously possible. Bias was less likely in quarter A, particularly prior to the midterm exam. After the midterm, E was beginning to formulate possible alternatives to the lecture format of the course, although the procedures that did evolve had not yet been developed. The two "experimental" quarters (C and D) in volved the use of typed notes. The notes from which all lectures had been taken were put into sentence and para graph form, were typed, and were reproduced for dis tribution to students. A resulting "handout" consisted of 76 double spaced typed pages. In the first "handout" quarter (C), the notes were distributed on a lecture by lecture basis. The students arrived at the regular sched uled class hour, just as in the lecture format. However, immediately upon arrival, the notes for that lecture period were distributed. The instructor remained in class for the remainder of the hour, and would answer any questions any student had about the assigned read ing materials or any lecture materials that had been dis tributed. He would discuss with students anything they wished to discuss, but did not himself initiate topics for discussion. This procedure was designed to parallel the usual lecture format as closely as possible, with the ex 253