Effective Teaching

There's an interesting piece in today's Chronicle of Higher Ed on the effectiveness of regular quizzes on learning. Basically, it appears that the act of recalling information (as for a quiz) reinforces the memory of that information. Quizzing people soon after they learn something produces pretty big improvements in their long term retention of that information.

That's useful to know, and it agrees with my own positive experiences using regular, short quizzes in the classroom. Quizzes have the additional benefit of forcing people to keep up with the material rather than trying to cram it all in at the end. Since class materials are typically cumulative, mastering material as one goes along means that one is able to better understand new material in the context of recently learned material.

Other simple things can make a big difference, too. I taught honors multivariate calculus most fall terms when I was at Dartmouth. There were 3 sections of the class, each taught by a different person. We all shared a syllabus, midterms, and finals, but apart from that were free to teach the course however we wanted. One thing I did that I thought was particularly effective was to spend about 2/3 of the class lecturing and then for the remainder of the class, pair up the students and have them work on an in-class exercise that made use of the concepts from the lecture. My sense was that it worked really well because the slower students ended up getting individualized attention from the faster students, and the faster students solidified their understandings by having to explain what they had just learned. In the end, my students invariably scored higher than those from the other two sections on the midterms and the finals, a fact that I attribute to the pairing exercises. Not by a few points, either - the difference in the class averages was often on the order of a letter grade. I'm sure this kind of thing is well-studied, but I was just making it up as I went along.

Here's the thing I'm wondering: there is a ton of research in education. Why do so few of the findings make it to the classroom? I don't know of any institutionalized mechanisms for extracting the most salient findings from the education literature and disseminating them to people who teach at the university level (sure, there are little seminars and special classes here and there; I'm talking something that goes to everybody). Why is that? Is there no reward structure in place for education researchers to disseminate their findings beyond education journals (where they will be read by a handful of other education researchers)? I suspect one could make tremendous improvements in S&E education simply by better publicizing things that are already known.

In fact, the whole enterprise could probably be done for maybe a few hundred thousand dollars given an enterprising faculty member with a bright master's student or two. Here's a great master's thesis idea:

1. Put together a review paper on what's known about the most effective ways of teaching college-level science / math / engineering.
2. Extract from that paper a 10-page executive summary.
3. Talk nicely to a foundation to get funds to print and widely disseminate copies to grad students, postdocs, and junior faculty.
4. Bask in fame.