Adam Scharpf, Department of Political Science

Abstract

University Lectures and Student Learning

 What and when do students learn in lectures? Lectures are the most widespread form of imparting knowledge to students at universities worldwide. However, studies suggest that lectures may be a suboptimal teaching method because students’ attention continually declines over the course of a class period. In order to find out what content students take away from a lecture, I conduct a survey among all participants at the end of a newly designed lecture. Students are asked to identify the correct statements from a randomized list of similarly difficult, topic-specific claims that were covered at equal intervals in the lecture. Empirical results from a quantitative analysis indicate that students acquire a significant amount of factual and conceptual knowledge. Interestingly, and in contrast to existing studies, this tends to happen after the first third of the lecture. In addition, the results show that students’ ability to recognize correct statements is independent of age, gender, language skills, course of study, physical location in the classroom, interest in the topic, and previous knowledge. This suggests that the studied lecture facilitated factual and conceptual learning across all student profiles. The results have implications for structuring future courses to maximize students' opportunities for active learning.