Dalton, Georgina Hilkka Margaretha;
(2025)
The Large Undergraduate Lecture: Experiences of Students and Lecturers.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
This research addresses the gap in higher education literature on teaching methods by investigating the large undergraduate lecture from both students’ and lecturers’ experiences. The research examines whether long-standing criticisms of the lecture as a pedagogic strategy, including that it encourages passive learning, are still valid in a 21st century university in the UK. Using a constructionist view of learning and theories of personality and cognition with an interpretivist approach, the research explores students’ conceptions of large lectures they attend and lecturers’ constructs of the lectures they deliver. A two-part mixed method investigation involved 43 interviews using a phenomenographic approach with students who had attended one of four observed lectures across different disciplines and ten case studies of lecturers, from a range of subject areas who delivered large lectures. The case studies were informed by the use of interviews using repertory grids based on Personal Construct Theory. The phenomenographic study of the students’ interviews revealed six qualitatively distinct categories, which describe how students experience the large lecture. These were the lecture: as a learning space; as the production of notes; as a performance; as students being engaged in their learning process with the lecturer; as students being engaged in their learning process with each other; in context as part of the learning process. Two themes of expanding awareness structured the outcome space and gave it an implicit hierarchy. These were: the nature of knowledge and, the nature of interaction. The analysis revealed student conceptions of the large lecture in terms of its pedagogy (students’ experiences of how they are taught in the large lecture) but also in terms of subject matter, their discipline, and the curriculum (students’ experiences of what they are taught in the lecture). The student experience of the large lecture is both individual and collective as an audience, interacting with the lecturer and each other. It may be that their conceptions are related to their understanding of their discipline knowledge, as well as to the nature of knowledge itself. Lectures have been critiqued as encouraging passive learning. This research demonstrates that whilst students certainly can conceive the large lecture as a passive experience, where an expert lecturer delivers key information and facts as knowledge that they capture in their notes for assessment purposes, that is far from the whole conception of the large lecture. The outcome space’s themes of expanding awareness of interaction and knowledge demonstrate a continuum of moving from forms of passive learning (listening, watching visual presentations, assimilating information) to active learning (lecturers challenging, lecturer-student and student-lecturer questions and discussion, student-student interaction, and task activities). The research also suggests that the notion of passive learning related to student notetaking in lectures may be misplaced. This is articulated by students across all the disciplines in all the observed lectures. The ten lecturer interviews elicited 88 personal constructs of how lecturers understand (or construe) their large lectures. Sorting and theming resulted in about half of the constructs corresponding to the students’ categories of description. This suggests that there is reasonable alignment between the large lecture experience of the students and how lecturers conceive their large lectures, which includes constructs relating to knowledge and to interaction. This is significant in the sense that there is a shared understanding of the large lecture as being an interactive teaching method, involving lecturer-student, student-lecturer, and student-student interaction. This research makes several contributions to the existing literature: • It articulates for the first time, through the phenomenographic outcome space, the different ways in which students experience the large undergraduate lecture. This will support lecturers in developing student-centred, pedagogically powerful lectures, and has implications for their professional development; • It challenges the notion of the large lecture as just encouraging passive rather than active learning, particularly with reference to notetaking for learning, and the nature of interaction within the large lecture; • It demonstrates for the first time some alignment between how the lecturer construes and how the student conceives the large lecture. Previous research into teaching methods have researched academics’ and students’ viewpoints in isolation from each other; • It comments on the extent to which students’ ways of experiencing the large lecture is similar and varies across disciplines.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Large Undergraduate Lecture: Experiences of Students and Lecturers |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Culture, Communication and Media |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10210134 |
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