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Lecture is, arguably, the oldest known instructional technique used in the university setting. Since it was first employed in Plato's Academy, lecture has become an indispensable part of teaching favored across the college and university curriculum. Recently, this time-honored method of instruction has come under attack for its presumed inability to foster higher order cognitive and attitudinal goals (Cashin 1985; Day 1980; Frederick 1999; Renner 1993). Critics of traditional lecture-based formats call for their replacement with active learning approaches that provide students with an opportunity to meaningfully talk, interact, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, and issues of an academic subject (Meyers and Jones 1993, 6).
Shall we cut back on lecturing in favor of novel "active" methods of instruction? Are lectures less effective than active learning techniques in promoting students' learning? This study compares student learning in traditional lecture and debate formats. Educational debate is an active learning strategy designed to engage students in the practice of important cognitive skills, such as critical thinking and deliberation, among others (Bonwell and Eison 1991; Scannapieco 1997). Developing these skills and shaping learners' attitudes toward divisive topics is widely assumed to be the greatest educational value of debate (Bauer and Wachowiak 1977; Brembeck 1949; Budesheim and Lundquist 1999; Combs and Bourne 1994). There is, however, a lack of compelling evidence linking debates to improved student learning (Hill 1993; Nandi et al. 2000).
Much of the research on the educational value of debate assesses the performance of students enrolled in argumentation courses, or those involved in formal debate tournaments. Since these analyses extend over a long period of time, during which debaters experience a medley of influences on their thinking, isolating the impact of debates on student learning has proven problematic. The attraction of students with high cognitive abilities to formal debates hindered the establishment of an irrefutable causal link between participation in debates and improved critical thinking (McGlone 1974, 140). The dearth of scholarship comparing debates with other instructional techniques, and problems with the measurement of learning outcomes, have undermined the quality of empirical findings (Antepohl and Herzig 1999, 107). Furthermore, since the majority of past studies have analyzed debating students but drawn conclusions about the impact of debates generalized to all students, to date...