Pseudoteaching

The Action-Reaction blog has an interesting post on "pseudoteaching" at MIT. They have defined pseudoteaching as teaching that looks like good teaching, but pseudoteaching doesn't help students learn. Pseudoteaching that's entertaining may look like good teaching to everyone involved - the teacher, to the students, and to observers, even though it's not very effective.

The post highlights John Lewin, a highly regarded physics professor who "clearly loves physics, and he loves sharing it with his students." His lectures were carefully rehearsed, practiced, and extremely entertaining.

The problem? The failure rate in his classes were too high, and by the end of the term, only 40% of students were attending his classes.

"...Lewin was pseudoteaching. It looks like good teaching, but he was the one doing all the talking. It looks like the students are learning, but they were just sitting there watching. It’s like trying to learn to play piano or play a sport by watching your teacher or coach. It doesn’t work well."

MIT is now using a hands-on approach, called TEAL (Technology Enhanced Active Learning), which has students and teachers doing experiments together, and working through problems.

Unfortunately, much of the teaching that happens in CME is pseudoteaching: Lectures that talk at people, rather than helping them work their way through problems and cases. The real value that experts can bring to a classroom is not the facts they know, but the ways that they think through problems. We know that lectures don't work in CME, It's been shown time and again that lecturing to professional does not change practice behavior. It's time to use more effective methods.



Lewin's lectures look very entertaining, but entertaining students, and actually helping them learn are not always the same thing. This is what MIT has moved away from:

More Positive Results for Spaced Education

In my last entry, I talked about the learning benefits of spaced education for 3rd year medical students doing a urology rotation. Spaced education means simply extended the learning and practice over time. The study I referenced looked at learning after giving students a series of questions using email and found better learning results for the students who had received this kind of education.

The authors of that study did a follow-up study (Journal of Urology, 2009, 181:2671-2673) and found that the benefits of that treatment could still be found, more than 2 years later. This is an amazing result for an educational study. It will certainly need to be replicated but it is very encouraging and speaks to the strength of spacing education out over time.

The authors found that students who had received the spaced education did significantly better on a test of the material than students who had not received the spaced education intervention. The test questions they were given were different from the questions they had answered in the original study (but were from the same batch so they were somewhat similar).

Spaced education and practice can be used fairly easily by using email or even mobile devices, a matter of spreading the practice over time. It should be used more often in CME applications.