Sessions

Does the present higher education system really provide the students with the opportunity to develop their skills and perform at their best? Does it enable them not only to pass their exams but truly master the material, so that they do not experience their education as a “necessary bad”?

Nowadays Hungarian higher education is mainly dominated by frontal teaching methods and in most cases students have only the opportunity to passively absorb everything they need to know from ready-made resources and they receive the first feedback about how well they did this at the exam first. But the information society of the 21st century changes both learning and concentration skills, making it increasingly difficult to study passively. This becomes especially a huge problem in subjects requiring large amount of lexical knowledge.

In this case there is an increasing need for teaching and learning methods that provide students with the opportunity to engage with the material actively and learning through action.

First-year veterinary students were involved voluntarily in an experiment where the applicants were divided into three groups. The first one could only learn passively, by reading the anatomy lecture material used in the experiment, while the other two groups applied active recall using two different systems. One group focused on smaller sections of the material at a time, but practising with three different task types in each interval of the experiment, then moved on to a completely different section without revising the previous one. The other group engaged with the entire material superficially during each session, using only one type of task, but in the following intervals they revised the whole material again through new types of tasks. At the end of the experiment, all groups completed a test that measured both performance and satisfaction.

The group that repeatedly revised the entire material in each session, performed significantly better on the test. There were also observed differences in students’ satisfaction: those who learned by active recall methods considered the intervals more effective.

We can conclude that to maintain a high standard of education, it is advisable to provide students with as many opportunities for active learning as possible. This approach not only enhances effectiveness, but students are more satisfied with it. Good practices may include the online exercises or paper-based collections of tasks, flashcards to support home study, as well as the introduction of collaborative problem-solving and active material processing during lectures and seminars.