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Student looking bored in lecture
Education, Teaching and learning

Time to bid goodbye to the psychology lecture

Steven Schwartz argues that psychology teaching should take heed of psychological research and offer more ‘problem-based learning’.

18 January 2004

Studies of learning and cognition have dominated psychology for 150 years. The findings of this research have had important implications for education (Bransford et al., 2000). Yet, psychological research has had little effect on how psychology itself is taught. Most psychology students still sit passively through lectures or their high-tech equivalent, the PowerPoint presentation. This brief polemic argues that it is time to change the way we teach psychology. It is time to move from passive to active forms of learning – from absorbing facts to solving problems.

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