Are College Lectures Unfair?

The New York Times:

DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?

The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.

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At the University of Texas at Austin, the psychology professors James W. Pennebaker and Samuel D. Gosling instituted a low-stakes quiz at the start of each meeting of their introductory psychology course. Compared with students who took the same course in a more traditional format, the quizzed students attended class more often and achieved higher test scores; the intervention also reduced by 50 percent the achievement gap between more affluent and less affluent students.

Minority, low-income, and first-generation students face another barrier in traditional lecture courses: a high-pressure atmosphere that may discourage them from volunteering to answer questions, or impair their performance if they are called on. Research in psychology has found that academic performance is enhanced by a sense of belonging — a feeling that students from these groups often acutely lack.

Read the whole story: The New York Times