Interaction beats out video lectures and even reading for learning

I’m looking forward to these results!  That interaction is better than video lectures is really not surprising.  That it leads to better learning than even reading is quite a surprise.  My guess is that this is mediated by student ability as a reader, but as a description of where students are today (like the prior posts on active learning), it’s a useful result.

Koedinger and his team further tested whether their theory that “learning by doing” is better than lectures and reading in other subjects. Unfortunately, the data on video watching were incomplete. But they were able to determine across four different courses in computer science, biology, statistics and psychology that active exercises were six times more effective than reading. In one class, the active exercises were 16 times more effective than reading. (Koedinger is currently drafting a paper on these results to present at a conference in 2016.)

Source: Did you love watching lectures from your professors? – The Hechinger Report