The available evidence shows that lectures are extremely poor at delivering conceptual understanding to students, even when delivered by relatively accomplished

The available evidence shows that lectures are extremely poor at delivering conceptual understanding to students, even when delivered by relatively accomplished professors. In a wide range of lecture-based introductory physics courses, for example, if you measure conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics before and after the course, you find that students only learn about 25% of what they didn't understand at the beginning.[1] (And students usually do pretty poorly on the pre-test.) With interactive teaching methods, you can boost that to 50%. The problem is that students don't have to engage with the material during lectures -- so if they hold misconceptions, they misinterpret the lecture in light of them, rather than realizing their errors. This can be seen in lecture demonstrations, for example, where students don't learn anything from just watching a demo, but do learn if you force them to think about the problem and make predictions first.[2] There's a methodology based on these concepts, Peer Instruction, which has students actively engage during class time by making predictions, explaining their reasoning to other students, and answering conceptual questions posed by the instructor. This has excellent results when tested.[3] This is a hobby horse of mine[4], and I think we need to judge our claims about education using the evidence, not our personal experience. Particularly because we are the least capable judges of our learning: as students new to a field, we are completely unqualified to judge how well we understand the field. [1] Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66(1), 64–74. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.18809 http://doi.org/10.1119/1.18809 [2] Crouch, C. H., Fagen, A. P., Callan, J. P., & Mazur, E. (2004). Classroom demonstrations: Learning tools or entertainment? American Journal of Physics, 72(6), 835–838. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1707018 http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1707018 [3] Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics, 69(9), 970–977. http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249 http://doi.org/10.1119/1.1374249 [4] https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2012-10-19-shutup.html https://www.refsmmat.com/posts/2012-10-19-shutup.html