Teaching Methods

Two pie charts show the changes in popularity of different teaching methods in the United States of America between 1999 and 2009. A few teaching methods remained famous in both periods, but some were less famous. Cooperative learning was popular in both 1999 and 2009, with 22% and 23% respectively. Many studies revealed that working together could maximize students' learning and improve their social skills.

Surprisingly, people believed that students learned by posing questions, finding out more about something and creating a project could help them learn best. Therefore, problem-based learning and project-based learning became more popular from 21% in 1999 to 22% in 2009.

Another method was game-based learning which focused on the use of board games or other kinds such as Kahoot, Plickers, Quizizz, Quizlet, RPG maker, at 8% in both years, which was similar to phenomenon-based learning in 1999, yet increased 3 times in 2009 because it was believed that using situations in students' world could engage students and increase their interdisciplinary understanding.

Also, direct instruction or lecture-only class became less popular over the same period of time, falling from 7% in 1999 to 1% in 2009. It was believed that lecture-only class was not useful. Unfortunately, visualizing which fostered students’ imagination was considered a good method in the past in 1999, with 13%, but it was no longer popular and disappeared in 2009.