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Imagine working with a partner who graduated from medical school without ever sitting through a lecture. It may seem sacrilegious—enduring lengthy sermons in anatomy, immunology, and cell biology has always been a rite of passage for med students. But, it turns out, being a passive recipient of information is not an optimal way to absorb or retain information.
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January 2018“If information delivery is your goal, the lecture is a bad way to do it,” said William Jeffries, PhD, senior associate dean for medical education at University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine (UVM) in Burlington. “Attention span wanes within the first 15 minutes.”
Studies have consistently shown that active learning methods are the best way for students to understand, absorb, retain, and utilize information as they work their way through selecting key ideas, organizing how those ideas relate to each other, and integrating how the new ideas relate to other things they already know.