Learning from Lectures for Comprehension

Abstract

This study reports a method of helping college students acquire skills to comprehend and learn from lectures. The method utilizes a commentable bulletin board with lecture video clips, which students reflect upon for knowledge integration. Learning from lectures has to be an active process, where learners need to decompose the linear input into components, to identify their roles, select parts important to the topic and to each learner's concern, and to integrate selected parts to form a coherent comprehension. This is comparable to but more demanding than learning from texts because learners have to engage in this decomposition and reconstruction "on line," without records. To make this situation more learnable, we provided sophomore students with a bulletin board on which sequences of 5 to 15 minute clips covering each lecture are placed for comment. Using this support tool, three 90-minute classes were devoted to guiding the students in decomposing and restructuring one of the lectures. Students were required to integrate selected parts of the lecture during this intervention. Sixty-one percent of the students successfully identified the structural connection of one episode at the beginning of the lecture to its main theme, compared to 7% who had succeeded without support prior to such an intervention. Some students commented that this was a new experience for them and gave them a new perspective to take lectures. On a transfer lecture, we found an increase from 5 out of 66 (7.6%) to 26 out of 62 (41%) in the number of students who could give more meaningful comments at the end of the lecture. The results show that the intervention was within reach for the middle-range students, with some potential for the acquired skills to stay on.