<p>here is what I read</p>
<p>“Before printing, it was very difficult to create books, and so someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. He points out that the word “lecture” comes from the Latin word meaning “to read.”</p>
<p>Redish is trying to change the way college students are taught. He says lecturing has never been an effective teaching method, and now that information is so easily accessible, lecturing is a waste of time.</p>
<p>“With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it,” Redish says. “Get 'em to do it once, put it on the web, and fire the faculty.”</p>
<p>Redish has been teaching at the University of Maryland since 1970. When he started, he lectured because that’s the way he had been taught. But after a few years in the classroom, Redish was meeting with one of his mentors, a famous physicist named Lewis Elton who had begun doing research on education.</p>
<p>“He asked me, ‘How’s your teaching?’”</p>
<p>Redish told him it was going well, but that he seemed to be most effective with the students “who do really well and are motivated” about physics.</p>
<p>Elton looked at Redish, smiled, and said, “They’re the ones who don’t really need you.”</p>
<p>“That was like an arrow to the breast!” says Redish.</p>
<p>He knew that Elton was right. Most of the students in his lecture classes were not motivated to learn physics, and they didn’t seem to be learning much. Redish thought back on his own experience as a college student and realized that he didn’t learn much in lecture classes either.</p>
<p>“When I had a question, I would find the TA,” he says. “He would explain stuff to me. I would find other students. I learned how to learn physics on my own.”
How People Learn</p>
<p>Redish wanted to reach the students who weren’t teaching themselves. So he began trying to better understand how people learn.</p>
<p>This was the 1970s and 80s, a time when cognitive scientists were making big breakthroughs in their understanding of how the human brain processes and retains information. At the same time, a small and growing group of physicists was becoming interested in the questions that kept Redish up at night: What do students learn in a traditional lecture-based physics class, and are there ways to teach them better?</p>
<p>Cognitive scientists determined that people’s short-term memory is very limited it can only process so much at once. A lot of the information presented in a typical lecture comes at students too fast and is quickly forgotten.</p>
<p>Physics education researchers, among whom Redish is now a leader, determined that the traditional lecture-based physics course where students sit and passively absorb information is not an effective way for students to learn. A lot of students can repeat the laws of physics and even solve complex problems, but many are doing it through rote memorization. Most students who complete a standard physics class never understand what the laws of physics mean, or how to apply them to real-world situations. (Read more about what physicists learned.)</p>