What was your favorite part of school? For many people, including myself, it was being around my friends and struggling together through hard classes. An impossible professor can bring a class together and help breed long lasting friendships. With this said, what if classes were structured differently and students never really got that chance to bond over difficult professors and hard exams?
Keller (1968) was a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and he had a different view on how to run a classroom most effectively. He and his colleagues determined that having a structure to promote efficacy and detailed learning of the material was better for the students. In his classrooms he split his course into units and suggested his students complete two units a week in order to stay on top of the material. The units consisted of a textbook chapter followed by homework assignments and lab exercises. Once the assignments were complete and the student was confident in unit’s material, he or she could take the unit test which was made of ten questions. The student had unlimited attempts to pass the tests, and to take the test they set up a time with the proctor to come in. Throughout the semester Keller offered seven traditional lectures, but in order to go to the lectures the students had to be up to date with the material which was determined by where they were in the sequence of unit tests.
This system worked, and it produced quality grades for the majority of the students. While I can’t deny that a go at own pace class is intriguing, I also cannot deny that I love the experience of sitting in a traditional lecture. I can’t speak for all college students, but I know that sitting in a lecture and listening to the questions my peers ask throughout class always helps me better understand the material. One person simply cannot think of every question or point of clarification, so having thirty other students around me to help probe the professor’s knowledge is extremely useful. This is the social part of learning that helps unite a class, and this is the part that is missing from Keller’s classroom. While it may not have affected the grades the students achieved in the course, I would be extremely interested to compare the mental state and stress levels between a student in Keller’s classroom to a student in a traditional style lecture. I would venture to hypothesize that the student who had a sense of belonging due to the social aspect that traditional lectures offer would also have a better mental state throughout the semester.
Keller, F. S. (1968). “Good-bye, teacher...” Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1(1), 79-89.
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