I thought this was a really interesting piece, as it takes a lot of extra time, etc. to prepare a lecture that’s more interesting, and even more time (often) to not “tell” students, but build in activities where they can learn for themselves:
“The fluent instructor was rated significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on traditional instructor evaluation questions, such as preparedness and effectiveness,” say the researchers in the journalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review.
“However…lecture fluency did not significantly affect the amount of information learned.”
There’s a worry that this model is simply being transported online in MOOCs:
“What is really worrying is that people are jumping on the massive open online course bandwagon, taking a failed model and putting it online. We need to rethink how people approach teaching,” he said.
Read full article.