A student would come to see me expressing a total lack of understanding of a topic. Why was it that even the top students were not retaining a clear understanding of this material? The second revelation came from office hours. And those comments were not unique to my course. First, colleagues who taught upper division courses would occasionally stop me in the hall and make comments such as: “Didn't you cover transcription and translation in your course? I have students from your class and they don't even seem to know the difference.” Certainly we had covered those topics.
The course was“ working,” so what made me think I needed to change anything? Two recurring experiences made me wonder about the effectiveness of my approach. For the first 6 years, I used a standard lecture format, and on the basis of student evaluations, the course was a success I routinely received excellent scores for both the course and for me as an instructor. I have taught introductory biology for the past 15 years. Along the way, I was introduced to several important concepts such as the difference between “teaching” and “learning,” the need to set learning goals and to utilize methods of assessment, and the value of becoming aware of the pedagogic research and adapting it to courses taught even at research-oriented universities. In this article, I describe my own conversion from teaching with a lecture format to the development of an active-learning approach (Klionsky, 1998, 2001 Klionsky and Tomashek, 1999).
They are replacing this approach with ones that involve active learning. A current wave of reform in undergraduate science education has prompted many instructors to move away from a passive learning format in which the instructor attempts to convey knowledge to students through lectures and note taking. In fact, teaching styles have not changed substantially since before the invention of the printing press. Our knowledge of biology has been changing dramatically, yet most of us continue to teach biology the same way we have for the past century.
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