One common concern I hear among those in the field of biology is how to teach students. Since there’s so many things to know in this field, professors typically only lecture the material at the students and the students memorize the information, take the exam, and forget about it the next day. I had a professor once call her exams “brain dumps” because you were just spitting back out her notes on her exams. I learned nothing from that class. I always hear complaints about how students are not actually learning the material but rarely do I see anyone trying to make a change about this issue because it’s what we know and it’s easy. There are complaints but nothing is even done to change anything.

I think it’s a slow transition out of the typical lecture format we are used to; people are resistant to change. I appreciated Talbert’s piece on how lectures are beneficial. There are times when you cannot get away from giving lectures but it does not mean we have to continue doing them as they have been done. I belive we can continue using lectures but alter things to “actively” enage the students in learning. This way, it is a less radical change that will make it easier for both students and professors to adapt to.

Some places are already starting to make this change. A paper was published on a technique called “Learning before Lecture” where students were given pre-class assignments and time during the lecture was spent on those assignments. The paper found a significant increase in performance after this method was used. A professor gives lectures where his slides are questions that forces the students to participate in the class. Methods like these are still similar to what we are used to but encourages both the students and professors to be active in the learning process. With methods like this, I hope we can move past the concept of “brain dump” exams and actually work on getting students interested and helping them understand their class material.