Abstract
Lectures are a commonly used teaching method in higher education, but there is significant debate about the relative merits of different classroom practices. Various classroom observation tools have been developed to try to give insight into these practices, beyond the simple dichotomy of “traditional lecturing versus active learning”. Here we review of a selection of classroom observation protocols from an ethological perspective and describe how this informed the development of a new protocol, FILL+. We demonstrate that FILL+ can be applied reliably by undergraduate students after minimal training. We analysed a sample of 208 lecture recordings from Mathematics, Physics, and Veterinary Medicine and found a wide variety of classroom practices, e.g. on average lecturers spent 2.1% (± 2.6%) of the time asking questions, and 79.3% (± 19%) of the lecture talking, but individuals varied considerably. The FILL+ protocol has the potential to be widely used, both in research on effective teaching practices, and in informing discussion of pedagogical approaches within institutions and disciplines.
Highlights
Recent changes to the higher education sector, the continued provision of lecture recording (Gysbers et al 2011), have renewed debate on the purpose of lecturing as a teaching activity in higher education (MacKay 2019)
The distribution of codes is extremely skewed and recent work has found that Krippendorff’s alpha is among a class of inter-rater reliability (IRR) coefficients that “underreport IR values in skewed frequency distributions” (Quarfoot and Levine 2016, p. 383)
We used irrCAC to compute Gwet’s AC1, which has been proposed as an IRR measure that can cope with skewed distributions
Summary
Recent changes to the higher education sector, the continued provision of lecture recording (Gysbers et al 2011), have renewed debate on the purpose of lecturing as a teaching activity in higher education (MacKay 2019). Lectures are undeniably a mainstay of higher education provision (Copeland et al 2000), but there is considerable debate around how to improve and refine them (Knol et al 2016). With this ongoing debate, there has been an interest in categorising what goes on inside a lecture, what students do, what staff do, and how this impacts aspects of student learning. Lammers and Murphy (2003) used student observers in live lectures to categorise who was interacting with the material, and found that the majority of lecture time featured the lecturer talking, with the students apparently passively listening. This type of behavioural categorisation, or ethological study, is one way of exploring what occurs in lectures
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