The lecture: increasing student learning

This study involved a single lecture given to second-year medical students. Its purpose was to detemine whether significant learning of the lecture content could occur during the lecture. The author's criteria for "significant" learning was mastery of 75 percent of what he predetermined to be the important of "required" content plus T-test analysis of pretest-posttest learning. The class divided into Groups A and B. At the commencement of the lecture Group A took Test 1 as its pretest and Group B took Test 2. Immediately following the lecture Group A took Test 2 as its posttest and Group B took Test 1. Comparing Test 1 with Test 2 as pretests and again as posttest, they were not significantly different at the .05 level. However, Group A's posttest scores were significantly higher than its pretest scores (p less than .005). The same was found for Group B, with both groups' averaging over 90 percent mastery of the required content and demonstrating that significant learning occurred during the lecture.