<p>Let's consider your Data Structures course example. The material from there is used throughout CS, and more advanced courses probably expect you to have completed Data Structures already, and will assume understanding. If the instructor never actually introduces to all the data structures that the syllabus lists, then your later course will be <strong>assuming knowledge that the student doesn't necessarily have</strong>.</p>

<p>It depends what exactly you mean by not making content King—if you simply don't teach some of the material and don't mention it much, then <strong>your students won't know it</strong>. However, something to consider:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>What is the goal of your course? To ensure that your students <em>know</em> the material so that they can build on it, or to encourage your students to apply their knowledge?  </p>

<p>If you want students to be able to apply what they know to unfamiliar concepts without your support, then definitely don't spoonfeed everything. However, it might be wiser to introduce all of the standard content, and then allow them to apply their knowledge on more obscure concepts.  </p>

<p>As an example, you could first introduce an array, then ask about a bitmap (which you might not cover in your instruction, so you can test them).</p></li>
<li><p>Will the material be needed later on? Would it be problematic if students didn't learn all the material? If so, perhaps it's best to cover the content in your class to ensure that they do understand.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>In an ideal world, you might give students a problem, and let them explore solutions to it rather than actually covering the content directly. For example:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>How can we represent pairings between two variables in a data structure? Can it be done in $\mathcal{O}(1)$ time?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Instead, a lot of the time, the content is just 'fed' to the students directly.</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Here is a hash table. It does X, Y and Z. It is useful because W.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Given a large amount of time, actually rediscovering some solutions to common problems would help your students to think critically and understand why certain design choices have been made in CS. But <strong>you could spend years rediscovering things that are already known, and sometimes just telling allows you to move on more quickly</strong>.</p>

<p>Removing 'the content' completely from the course would essentially render it pointless—if there's no goal (<em>"in this course, we will learn X"</em>), the course wouldn't really seem to help anyone.</p>

<p>As a summary of my views: <strong>delivering the content is practically a requirement</strong> given the time constraints of most courses, rather than letting students investigate things for themselves. Perhaps changing this would provide some benefits, but the current system has emerged because it's pretty efficient as passing on knowledge, even though some students don't benefit <em>as much as they could</em>.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T18:26:09.493Z
But is it efficient at the cost of effectiveness? Socrates didn't need efficiency. How much does that need overpower all else, possibly to the detriment of the learner.
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T18:30:53.863Z
@Buffy Efficiency in that you could spend years working through slowly, discovering each result one by one, but it's inefficient in terms of cost, and time (as much as learning is a great thing, some people don't want to dedicate a life to academia). Whether the priority of efficiency is a good thing in society is a question I cannot answer, particularly not on a CS Education site... It's a far more complex philosophical idea that I don't really know the answer to.
Aurora0001
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T18:34:43.980Z
To twist the question a bit, what is it that you want for your students, primarily; that they _know_, or that they _can do_. Not quite the same and content aids one more than the other. If I know 3 data structures in Java, can I grok the others on a need to know basis? So is it better to "see more" or better to "work with what I have seen?"  And I'm pretty sure the answer is different in CS than in other fields. And possibly not the same if the person is headed to grad school vs a job
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T21:40:29.290Z
@Buffy Doesn't that depend on the course? The primary goal for some courses might be to teach applied skills ("by the end of this course, you should know how to work as a team and use source control to write software to control robots that open doors"), while other courses might focus on practical knowledge ("you'll learn about eight different data structures and how they work"), foundational knowledge ("you'll learn about these types of mathematics and proofs"), or even to give students an overview of topics in a particular subfield so they know what's out there. There's no one answer.
Zach Lipton
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T18:00:40.250Z
2017-07-02T18:00:40.250Z
Aurora0001
<p>Firstly, I would say that some things <em>do</em> come before content. Student safety and well being, for one. If you are so focused on content you can't see that a student is having serious problems (bullying, home life, etc) then that's no good. A student must be able to "ingest" the content being presented, and they can't really do that if they aren't well fed, feeling safe, tired, sad, "antsy" or feeling like moving (seriously - ever tried going from P.E. right into a test?), etc. </p>

<p>So let's say that first step is fulfilled, and a student is able to pay attention. The next thing I'd say is presentation. This is the difference between plopping up the quadratic formula on the board in Algebra I and having every student write it in their notes and move on, and explaining it, perhaps with some examples, or whatever. In both cases, the students "get" the information, but unless they are devoted textbook readers and question-askers, I doubt they'd actually understand it and be able to use it. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean just explaining it, this means keeping the student's attention, it means slideshows, videos, activities, demonstrations - things other than just the robot droning teacher.</p>

<p>Then, practice. What use is information if it can't be used? Problems, labs, and so on, are just as important as the content itself. You can't have a presentation or a problem about nothing - there has to be some substance to it. But the content won't get through with the presentations and it won't be useful without the problems. But safety and well-being of the students comes above it all.</p>

<p>Also, study strategies are important, and so are the prerequisites for the content. These are things, which, if the students don't understand, will make things a lot harder for them. There's probably also things I haven't thought of here - this was supposed to be a general overview and then got a little longer than I thought =) </p>

<p>So: is content king? No, content alone cannot do much. It must be coupled with a student ready and able to learn, a good presentation, and practice to solidify the content and make it useful.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T19:22:54.640Z
If I interpret "presentation" as content delivery (yes, not your words), would you value presentation over practice, or the other way round?
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T19:28:18.693Z
@Buffy, yes, I think presentation would be content delivery, that makes sense. And I think I would value presentation over practice, though only just. It is hard to practice what you do not know, but once you know it, you must practice it.
auden
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T19:54:50.090Z
I might switch them. I usually learn a new language by working in it, not reading (very much) about it. Can the knowledge emerge from the practice? Preference is important, of course, but I'm going to take a wild stab and guess you aren't a "typical" student in your age cohort. I can't imagine my grandson writing like you do - only a bit younger. Your feedback here is as real as it gets.
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-30T23:37:36.427Z
@Buffy well...see, I think it depends on what you are teaching. If it's, say, 'program this', then yeah, practice is more important. And like you say with a language, practice is more important. But in math, for example, you can't expect a student to derive all of math for themselves - you have to teach the formulas, and *then* let them practice.
auden
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-30T23:44:49.480Z
you would be especially interested in the teaching methods of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore. While he was not an exemplary human being in all respects, his teaching methods were unique. In fact, his students, many of whom rose to the very height of the profession, did, indeed derive everything for themselves.
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-30T23:54:39.277Z
@Buffy an interesting method that I'd kind of enjoy - in fact, it sounds a lot like critical reading as a self-teaching student, where you try to pick holes in and prove every theorem you come across. However, I'm not sure that's a great method for a large(r) class of widely ranging abilities, especially not a graduate/higher level class of more motivated students.
auden
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T19:00:17.023Z
2017-07-02T19:00:17.023Z
auden
<p>"Active learning" teaching techniques in STEM courses increase performance by half a standard deviation compared to traditional instruction. </p>

<p>The National Academy of Sciences (an authoritative source) published a review of literature (an article which puts together all articles that meet date and study characteristics criteria) on active learning vs. traditional lecture in university STEM courses. The metastudy concluded that the data were so conclusive that it is no longer ethical to conduct such human experiments in which half the university students receive traditional instruction. The metastudy suggested that subsequent studies should instead drop the traditional-classroom control group and pit one active learning technique against another.</p>

<p>Freeman et al. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111:23. Retrieved from <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full</a></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-07T01:22:32.437Z
I desperately love this information, (and just purchased a book about active learning because of this post), but if it is an answer to OPs question, I'm having trouble seeing how. Are you suggesting that active learning is specifically more important than course content?  I wonder if there is somewhere else this information fits into the site, because it is so darned important
Ben I.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-07T03:01:18.813Z
@BenI The usual defense of traditional teaching is that the teacher can "get through" more content or include more ancillary information. My answer is intended to say that these reasons are misguided and that if covering content trades off against student involvement, go with student involvement.
Bennett Brown
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-07T09:17:26.250Z
Okay, I see where you're going with that, though it's not really made explicit.  Rather than fixing it here. though, do you think that this answer might be a better fit [here](https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/1444/how-do-you-make-your-cs-lectures-more-interesting)?
Ben I.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-03T01:56:00.710Z
2017-07-03T01:56:00.710Z
Bennett Brown
<p><strong>Note</strong>: <em>This answer is not long, but it is not meant to be skimmed.</em></p>

<p>The most important goal is to make emotionally healthy, capable, empowered adults who can solve the problems that life throws at them in the future.  We don't get to know what those problems are. Many of the problems don't exist yet. We don't get to know what tools will be available to solve the problems. Many of the tools don't exist yet.  All of which leaves us with the central challenge: we ultimately must teach our students to be adaptive, flexible thinkers and learners.</p>

<p>Flexibility comes from learned patterns of thinking (literally patterns and formations of neurons that allow us to easily integrate similar future patterns of thinking) and from meta-learning knowledge (e.g. "I am capable of learning new material when I need to by breaking things down into steps", or "I tend to learn more easily from books than from videos").</p>

<p>The course material, then, is somewhat secondary to the central concern. Carefully chosen, however, it becomes the motivation for the more central learning.  </p>

<p>This is important: every school that I've ever heard of offering a class like "study skills" eventually dropped it.  Directly studying how to learn does not appear to serve us well. We need rich systems to engage with, and we then come to the meta-learning slowly  and in due time.  That is what the course material accomplishes for us. It is the rich set of motivating material with which we can empower people to solve the problems of the future.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-03T00:01:51.773Z
How do you and others react to the statement that "the most important part of education is the relationship between a student and a professor." What are the consequences of accepting or rejecting that view for society?
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T23:08:02.570Z
2017-07-02T23:08:02.570Z
Ben I.
<p>In most fields instructors spend a lot of time on the Content of a course. Often this is phrased as Delivering Content, or Completing the Syllabus. The traditional picture, whether valid or not, is an instructor (single) broadcasting Content to students (multiple). I wonder if this is a common view of CS education. </p>

<p>In a course like Data Structures, there a lot of things (content) that the student has to learn: Stacks, Sets, Trees, ... along with common algorithms. Normally there is a syllabus that lists all these things in some rational order. "Covering it" is a sort of meta-constraint (or sometimes a hard constraint) on the instructor. </p>

<p>In the compiler course, the Content is more about technique than facts, of course, but those techniques possibly <em>are</em> the content: scanning, parsing, ...</p>

<p>So, I guess the question that I would most like advice on here is:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p><strong>If you could order your goals in a typical undergrad course where
  would "Deliver
  the Content" fit?</strong> High, Low? What, if anything, would be above it? </p>
</blockquote>

<p>What would be the effect on your students if you move that goal up? down? remove it altogether? </p>

<p>Another aspect of this is how much control does/should the professor have in the flow of the course; especially in content delivery? Absolute? None? What balance works for you? </p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T17:38:22.703Z
Maybe you could expand that to a full answer. Maybe you are saying it is just an (absolute?) constraint. Or not?
Buffy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-07-02T18:27:22.963Z
I'm more interested in _your_ goals and how you think they balance.
Buffy
<best-practice><undergraduate>
How important is "delivering the content" of a course?
# How important is "delivering the content" of a course?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-07-02)

In most fields instructors spend a lot of time on the Content of a course. Often this is phrased as Delivering Content, or Completing the Syllabus. The traditional picture, whether valid or not, is an instructor (single) broadcasting Content to students (multiple). I wonder if this is a common view of CS education.

In a course like Data Structures, there a lot of things (content) that the student has to learn: Stacks, Sets, Trees, ... along with common algorithms. Normally there is a syllabus that lists all these things in some rational order. "Covering it" is a sort of meta-constraint (or sometimes a hard constraint) on the instructor.

In the compiler course, the Content is more about technique than facts, of course, but those techniques possibly *are* the content: scanning, parsing, ...

So, I guess the question that I would most like advice on here is:

> **If you could order your goals in a typical undergrad course where
> would "Deliver
> the Content" fit?** High, Low? What, if anything, would be above it?

What would be the effect on your students if you move that goal up? down? remove it altogether?

Another aspect of this is how much control does/should the professor have in the flow of the course; especially in content delivery? Absolute? None? What balance works for you?

**Tags:** best-practice, undergraduate

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Maybe you could expand that to a full answer. Maybe you are saying it is just an (absolute?) constraint. Or not?  
> **username_0**: I'm more interested in _your_ goals and how you think they balance.  

---

## 4 answers

### Answer by username_5 on 2017-07-02. Score: 4 | Accepted answer

**Note**: *This answer is not long, but it is not meant to be skimmed.*

The most important goal is to make emotionally healthy, capable, empowered adults who can solve the problems that life throws at them in the future. We don't get to know what those problems are. Many of the problems don't exist yet. We don't get to know what tools will be available to solve the problems. Many of the tools don't exist yet. All of which leaves us with the central challenge: we ultimately must teach our students to be adaptive, flexible thinkers and learners.

Flexibility comes from learned patterns of thinking (literally patterns and formations of neurons that allow us to easily integrate similar future patterns of thinking) and from meta-learning knowledge (e.g. "I am capable of learning new material when I need to by breaking things down into steps", or "I tend to learn more easily from books than from videos").

The course material, then, is somewhat secondary to the central concern. Carefully chosen, however, it becomes the motivation for the more central learning.

This is important: every school that I've ever heard of offering a class like "study skills" eventually dropped it. Directly studying how to learn does not appear to serve us well. We need rich systems to engage with, and we then come to the meta-learning slowly and in due time. That is what the course material accomplishes for us. It is the rich set of motivating material with which we can empower people to solve the problems of the future.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: How do you and others react to the statement that "the most important part of education is the relationship between a student and a professor." What are the consequences of accepting or rejecting that view for society?  

---

### Answer by username_1 on 2017-07-02. Score: 6

Let's consider your Data Structures course example. The material from there is used throughout CS, and more advanced courses probably expect you to have completed Data Structures already, and will assume understanding. If the instructor never actually introduces to all the data structures that the syllabus lists, then your later course will be **assuming knowledge that the student doesn't necessarily have**.

It depends what exactly you mean by not making content King—if you simply don't teach some of the material and don't mention it much, then **your students won't know it**. However, something to consider:

* What is the goal of your course? To ensure that your students *know* the material so that they can build on it, or to encourage your students to apply their knowledge?

  If you want students to be able to apply what they know to unfamiliar concepts without your support, then definitely don't spoonfeed everything. However, it might be wiser to introduce all of the standard content, and then allow them to apply their knowledge on more obscure concepts.

  As an example, you could first introduce an array, then ask about a bitmap (which you might not cover in your instruction, so you can test them).
* Will the material be needed later on? Would it be problematic if students didn't learn all the material? If so, perhaps it's best to cover the content in your class to ensure that they do understand.

In an ideal world, you might give students a problem, and let them explore solutions to it rather than actually covering the content directly. For example:

> How can we represent pairings between two variables in a data structure? Can it be done in $\mathcal{O}(1)$ time?

Instead, a lot of the time, the content is just 'fed' to the students directly.

> Here is a hash table. It does X, Y and Z. It is useful because W.

Given a large amount of time, actually rediscovering some solutions to common problems would help your students to think critically and understand why certain design choices have been made in CS. But **you could spend years rediscovering things that are already known, and sometimes just telling allows you to move on more quickly**.

Removing 'the content' completely from the course would essentially render it pointless—if there's no goal (*"in this course, we will learn X"*), the course wouldn't really seem to help anyone.

As a summary of my views: **delivering the content is practically a requirement** given the time constraints of most courses, rather than letting students investigate things for themselves. Perhaps changing this would provide some benefits, but the current system has emerged because it's pretty efficient as passing on knowledge, even though some students don't benefit *as much as they could*.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: But is it efficient at the cost of effectiveness? Socrates didn't need efficiency. How much does that need overpower all else, possibly to the detriment of the learner.  
> **username_1**: @username_0 Efficiency in that you could spend years working through slowly, discovering each result one by one, but it's inefficient in terms of cost, and time (as much as learning is a great thing, some people don't want to dedicate a life to academia). Whether the priority of efficiency is a good thing in society is a question I cannot answer, particularly not on a CS Education site... It's a far more complex philosophical idea that I don't really know the answer to.  
> **username_0**: To twist the question a bit, what is it that you want for your students, primarily; that they _know_, or that they _can do_. Not quite the same and content aids one more than the other. If I know 3 data structures in Java, can I grok the others on a need to know basis? So is it better to "see more" or better to "work with what I have seen?"  And I'm pretty sure the answer is different in CS than in other fields. And possibly not the same if the person is headed to grad school vs a job  
> **username_2**: @username_0 Doesn't that depend on the course? The primary goal for some courses might be to teach applied skills ("by the end of this course, you should know how to work as a team and use source control to write software to control robots that open doors"), while other courses might focus on practical knowledge ("you'll learn about eight different data structures and how they work"), foundational knowledge ("you'll learn about these types of mathematics and proofs"), or even to give students an overview of topics in a particular subfield so they know what's out there. There's no one answer.  

---

### Answer by username_3 on 2017-07-02. Score: 4

Firstly, I would say that some things *do* come before content. Student safety and well being, for one. If you are so focused on content you can't see that a student is having serious problems (bullying, home life, etc) then that's no good. A student must be able to "ingest" the content being presented, and they can't really do that if they aren't well fed, feeling safe, tired, sad, "antsy" or feeling like moving (seriously - ever tried going from P.E. right into a test?), etc.

So let's say that first step is fulfilled, and a student is able to pay attention. The next thing I'd say is presentation. This is the difference between plopping up the quadratic formula on the board in Algebra I and having every student write it in their notes and move on, and explaining it, perhaps with some examples, or whatever. In both cases, the students "get" the information, but unless they are devoted textbook readers and question-askers, I doubt they'd actually understand it and be able to use it. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean just explaining it, this means keeping the student's attention, it means slideshows, videos, activities, demonstrations - things other than just the robot droning teacher.

Then, practice. What use is information if it can't be used? Problems, labs, and so on, are just as important as the content itself. You can't have a presentation or a problem about nothing - there has to be some substance to it. But the content won't get through with the presentations and it won't be useful without the problems. But safety and well-being of the students comes above it all.

Also, study strategies are important, and so are the prerequisites for the content. These are things, which, if the students don't understand, will make things a lot harder for them. There's probably also things I haven't thought of here - this was supposed to be a general overview and then got a little longer than I thought =)

So: is content king? No, content alone cannot do much. It must be coupled with a student ready and able to learn, a good presentation, and practice to solidify the content and make it useful.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: If I interpret "presentation" as content delivery (yes, not your words), would you value presentation over practice, or the other way round?  
> **username_3**: @username_0, yes, I think presentation would be content delivery, that makes sense. And I think I would value presentation over practice, though only just. It is hard to practice what you do not know, but once you know it, you must practice it.  
> **username_0**: I might switch them. I usually learn a new language by working in it, not reading (very much) about it. Can the knowledge emerge from the practice? Preference is important, of course, but I'm going to take a wild stab and guess you aren't a "typical" student in your age cohort. I can't imagine my grandson writing like you do - only a bit younger. Your feedback here is as real as it gets.  
> **username_3**: @username_0 well...see, I think it depends on what you are teaching. If it's, say, 'program this', then yeah, practice is more important. And like you say with a language, practice is more important. But in math, for example, you can't expect a student to derive all of math for themselves - you have to teach the formulas, and *then* let them practice.  
> **username_0**: you would be especially interested in the teaching methods of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Moore. While he was not an exemplary human being in all respects, his teaching methods were unique. In fact, his students, many of whom rose to the very height of the profession, did, indeed derive everything for themselves.  
> **username_3**: @username_0 an interesting method that I'd kind of enjoy - in fact, it sounds a lot like critical reading as a self-teaching student, where you try to pick holes in and prove every theorem you come across. However, I'm not sure that's a great method for a large(r) class of widely ranging abilities, especially not a graduate/higher level class of more motivated students.  

---

### Answer by username_4 on 2017-07-03. Score: 2

"Active learning" teaching techniques in STEM courses increase performance by half a standard deviation compared to traditional instruction.

The National Academy of Sciences (an authoritative source) published a review of literature (an article which puts together all articles that meet date and study characteristics criteria) on active learning vs. traditional lecture in university STEM courses. The metastudy concluded that the data were so conclusive that it is no longer ethical to conduct such human experiments in which half the university students receive traditional instruction. The metastudy suggested that subsequent studies should instead drop the traditional-classroom control group and pit one active learning technique against another.

Freeman et al. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111:23. Retrieved from <http://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410.full>

> **Comments:**
> **username_5**: I desperately love this information, (and just purchased a book about active learning because of this post), but if it is an answer to OPs question, I'm having trouble seeing how. Are you suggesting that active learning is specifically more important than course content?  I wonder if there is somewhere else this information fits into the site, because it is so darned important  
> **username_4**: @BenI The usual defense of traditional teaching is that the teacher can "get through" more content or include more ancillary information. My answer is intended to say that these reasons are misguided and that if covering content trades off against student involvement, go with student involvement.  
> **username_5**: Okay, I see where you're going with that, though it's not really made explicit.  Rather than fixing it here. though, do you think that this answer might be a better fit [here](https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/1444/how-do-you-make-your-cs-lectures-more-interesting)?  

---

