Hora Enters National Academies of Science Debate

September 5, 2014

A letter to the editor by WCER researcher Matthew T. Hora appears in the current issue of the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS). In the letter, Hora takes issue with the experimental design of a recent meta-analysis, which concluded that lecturing increases student failure rates and generally provides an “inferior education” to undergraduate students.

In response to a paper written by collaborating researchers at the University of Washington–Seattle and University of Maine, which categorized teaching as either “lecturing” or as utilizing “active learning” modalities across 225 studies, Hora points out that the lecturing condition is never operationally defined in precise terms in the publications.  In other words, it is not clear what lecturing means.

Hora, who holds a Ph.D. in the learning sciences and studies how pedagogical reforms are adopted or rejected by postsecondary teachers, explains in his letter that teaching is a “multifaceted phenomenon that belies easy categorization.”  He notes that evidence suggests lecturing can be an effective instructional approach, particularly when used in conjunction with other techniques.

“My stance isn’t that lecturing is great, but that in making claims we need to be far more nuanced and careful about the types of instruction we think should be happening in higher education, and that a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach rarely works,” Hora said in a separate interview.

A response written by the research paper’s authors argues that the problem of imprecisely defined experimental conditions was addressed by the statistical method used to conduct the meta-analysis. In defending the original paper’s assertions, the authors do not address the larger issue of the lack of specificity in the experimental conditions being compared, Hora says.