This column shares reflections or thoughtful opinions on issues of broad interest to the community. This month's issue discusses the value of traditional lecturing.

Contemporary traditional education understanding and applications have always been criticized in Turkey. The characteristics of traditional education are the following: class-centered teaching and crowded classrooms, teacher-oriented education, intensive curriculum, traditional teaching methods, and verbal evaluation of student success. Positive…

Suggests reasons why faculty members prefer the lecture method and describes a combination method of instruction that combines the features of the lecture method and personalized system of instruction. (JEG)

This paper reviews the literature in three areas of change in college teaching--peer teaching or tutoring, individualized instruction, and cooperative learning. The focus of the paper is how knowledge is acquired, and acted upon, by students. The advantages and disadvantages of each type of teaching are explored, as well as the rates of successful…

Salient features of an ideal system of instruction are discussed. There have been recent attempts to write formulas for instruction and to individualize teaching in ways suggested by the science of behavior. DNA technologies may some day enable us to trace correlates of intelligence. We could then design individual educational strategies. (RM)

The beliefs and experiences of three college teachers at a college of business are described to examine assumptions about teaching and its improvement. One of the teachers was a full professor who had spent 12 years with a consulting firm and continued to work as a consultant. Classroom observation revealed that he was an outstanding narrator who…

Lists the benefits of lecturing over other instructional methods. (AEA)

This paper outlines a method of transforming traditional learning methods into a competency-based approach in a series of steps. The paper is organized in three sections. The first section defines competency-based education (CBE) and explains how this approach differs from traditional education. It also advances reasons why the competency-based…

Drawn largely from the experiences of Bloomfield College (Illinois) with its Freshman Core Program, but citing other efforts to develop thinking skills as well, this essay considers several questions and issues concerning the cognitive skills approach to teaching. The paper begins by identifying some of the increasingly common learning problems…