Posted on 09/13/2015 8:01:32 AM PDT by reaganaut1
DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?
The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.
Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.
The partiality of the lecture format has been made visible by studies that compare it with a different style of instruction, called active learning. This approach provides increased structure, feedback and interaction, prompting students to become participants in constructing their own knowledge rather than passive recipients.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
So...is the NYT saying that women and minorities aren’t smart enough to follow a basic lecture?
For crying out loud. What is it...a slow news day. What a bunch of PC crap.
If that is indeed the case, it’s time to shut down all US colleges and universities.
Women are 33% more likely to earn college degrees than men.
I guess if college lectures stopped being so “unfair”, the number of men with degrees would further decrease. And we could throw rocks at them.
What would the world be like if it was inhabited only by women and minorities?
I was about to say, if college lectures are biased, why are more women and minorities going to college now than white males?
The article reads like it was written by a freshman college student, masking her displeasure with getting a bad grade as a journalistic piece
We are gradually finding out as I see how many mullato babies are filling our schools - children of white mothers and minority fathers who will grow up being taught to blame everything on white males and punish whitey for his alleged sins.
They are future Obamas just waiting to be indoctrinated.
You need to get with the program to use only gender neutral pronouns, comrade.
Not sure I understand the article. Aren’t most college lecturers libs and their main points are the destruction of the white christian male domination of the world?
Not sure I understand the article. Aren’t most college lecturers libs and their main points are the destruction of the white christian male domination of the world?
I hope lectures do discriminate. We need more not less discrimination. We need separation of the best and brightest from the dross.
Oh geesh, every damn thing in our society is somehow automatically “white” as well as “male” so IT discriminates. I’m amazed how everything only fits 1 precise demographic, and doesn’t happen to work for any others?
Well, actually, (I didn’t read yet, forgive) does it discriminate against orientals?
Because they seem to do pretty well in anything, even math a science in a crowd from a distance.
OK, so maybe lecture halls aren’t great for me, a girl - I know I seemed to have a hard time with it - but I’d hardly call it discrimination.
Apparently being black is a learning disability.
What would the world be like if it was inhabited only by women and minorities?
Good question.
Soon, due to the rich 1%, we ALL will be minorities.
OK, I agree. Intelligence is a “White Privilege.”
OK... so they don’t understand standard English. Well, what’s the alternative? More written instruction? Wait, the people who have difficulty understanding spoken English usually have reading deficits too.
The article itself shows that lectures do not favor white males. Several quotes from the article completely explain what is going on here.
“...we learn new material by anchoring it to knowledge we already possess. The same lecture, given by the same professor in the same lecture hall, is actually not the same for each student listening; students with more background knowledge will be better able to absorb and retain what they hear.”
So students who are prepared for college can learn new stuff easier.
“In the structured course, all demographic groups reported completing the readings more frequently and spending more time studying; all groups also achieved higher final grades than did students in the lecture course.”
So if you do all the work you are supposed to do, you get better grades.
What the author doesn’t realize is that she is saying that minorities and women are less prepared for college and have poor study skills. She tries to pin their problems on outside factors, when in fact she is showing the problems are with the students and not the teaching format.
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