Hi everyone,
This might seem like a deathly boring question, but I think it's worth considering. I
used to use no handouts at all, just uploading the slides and supplementary material
(sometimes inherited handouts) to the course site. Nobody brought any of these to
lectures though, at least not as far as I could see, and I saw some eyes wandering
and wondered if it might be down to not having anything in front of them to follow
along with. I've also previously used extremely detailed handouts, but that seemed to
be a disincentive to paying any attention to the lecture. Why bother when it's all
written in front of you? And then, since it's in front of you and also on the screen,
why not just, y'know, quickly check Facebook, and hey, look at this! Hah hah... So I
looked into it in a bit more detail and found this article which pretty much backed
up what I'd thought was going on:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.2350020203/abstract. The article
showed that too much detail (e.g. just printing out the slides) meant students had no
incentive to write any notes; too little detail caused many to lose track of the
overall lecture; while providing a skeleton structure (just the main headings plus a
little detail) avoided both these pitfalls and led to the highest scores in a
standardised recall test. Nowadays I tend to give a single sheet with minimal detail
and any really key quotes. It's double-spaced too so that they can easily scribble in
the spaces. I think it's striking a happy medium, as per the article, based on their
movements in class, though I haven't surveyed my students about it.
What are other people's approaches to handouts? I haven't mentioned the many
possibilities of electronic handouts; I think that's kind of a separate issue. I
thought I'd focus here on tree-killing teaching methods.
Dave
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Dr. Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University (2009-2015)
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