Can students be mistaken about the efficacy of teaching?

At the November meeting of our Bioscience Pedagogic Research group I led a discussion of the recent paper “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom“. The study, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by Louis Deslauriers and was conducted on Physical Sciences programs at Harvard University.

Slides from my summary of the paper can be seen here

The principal take-home message from the study was that students learned more from active teaching sessions, despite feeling that they had gained more from passive lectures. It was a “cross-over study” (all participants experienced both teaching methods, but on different topics) and all had the same hand-outs and slides, in either the ‘active’ or the ‘passive’ sessions. As the authors point out “The crucial difference between the two groups was whether students were told directly how to solve each problem or were asked to try to solve the problems themselves in small groups before being given the solution” (p19252).