Are College Lecture Unfair

Can college lectures actually be discriminating against you? Well it might be, according to Anne Murphy Paul, if you are a not a white privileged male. In Paul’s article “Are College Lectures Unfair?” she discusses studies that have shown college lectures to be very biased towards a particular group of students such as, women, minorities, low-income, and first generation college students. Instead of a professor giving the typical structured lecture, he or she should try active learning; a style where students are more engaged with the instructor and the information given in class. Paul’s article definitely is strong in getting her message across with studies behind it, however it could have been more directed to students on a higher personal …show more content…
Annie Paul describes it as “This approach provides increased structure, feedback and interaction, prompting students to become participants in constructing their own knowledge rather than passive recipients”. A study was done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on a biology class taught by Kelly A. Hogan. One class was given ungraded guiding-reading questions, in-class active learning exercises, and graded online assignments. They were compared to a class that only had lectures in class. Overall the students in the more involved class reported studying more and having better final grades than those in the lecture class. Along with those findings, the study showed that black students and first-generation students did remarkably well, closing gaps between every student. As shown Paul did an excellent job at logically and proficiently explaining that active learning is beneficial to students. There also was an experiment done where women made up most of the class, but accounted for less than half of the students answering questions during class. So, they put more lectures online and made the class more debate and talk friendly, in a low pressure environment. This technique helped their exam performance become twelve percent higher than the flipped class, and female students performing at almost the same level as their male …show more content…
In addition to the experiment done at Chapel Hill, there were several more conducted in support to Paul’s claim that active learning is a better teaching technique than college lectures alone. The University of Texas also found evidence to back up that active learning is more beneficial to the previous mentioned groups. Also the article did mention that active learning doesn’t work as well for white privileged males as it did for the minority groups, but they still perform well in an active learning ran