Your lecture should present no more than three or four major issues, with time for examples and questions. Anything more than a few points and your students will be overwhelmed. Determine the critical message of your lecture and then remove the adornments --present the bare bones in a succinct story. Students will absorb the salient points easily if they are few in number, clear, and coupled with examples. Emphasize the fundamentals during class time, and assign papers or projects to allow students to explore unresolved issues in the field. Students need concrete, well-organized information in class. Out-of-class assignments and activities can be used to illustrate the true complexity of science. There's still much to discover.
Break up your lectures so that they are presented in 20-minute chunks. What's wrong with a 1- or 2-hour lecture? Research shows that students remember the first and the last ten minutes of lecture, but little of the intervening time. Undergraduate students have a limited attention span--so take advantage of it to structure your class. Switch gears after each 20 minute minilecture and do something different: Pose a discussion question, a short in-class writing assignment, small group discussion, or problem-solving activity.
**This article first appeared in Science's Next Wave
