A new study about college-level science shows that all students do much better when traditional lecture classes are made interactive — but those most helped are first-generation and black students.
UNC’s Kelly Hogan and Sarah Eddy from the University of Washington at Seattle found that all students in the interactive classes performed better than those in traditional lecture courses, but the greatest benefit was seen with black and first-generation students; the achievement gap was halved for black students and disappeared for first-generation students.
A release about the study quoted Hogan as saying:
“If I’m talking at students, they’re shopping, they’re on ESPN or Facebook. But if I ask them a question and have them wrestle with it, they are listening now because they are engaged in solving that problem.”
Students responded to surveys given to them at the end of their course and those in the interactive classes said they felt they were part of a learning community and spent more time studying and preparing for class than those in the traditional lecture courses.