Johnnie Moore, writing recently from an Improv conference, reported Thiagi providing a great confirmation of how people don't learn just by just listening.
He referred to research he's done on how much people learn whilst listening to lectures. He set a test at the end of a short lecture and found that people scored only about 19% after a normal lecture. Then he tried something different - using the same lecture but interspersing breaks. During the breaks, the audience formed groups and had to set questions for a quiz, based on the lecture, with which to test other audience members. In another variation, he actually ran the quiz too. With the question-setting built in (and without actually doing the quiz), the test scores soared to 82%. Actually adding the intermittent quiz moved the final results to 96% - so just the exercise of setting the questions had the most impact.
As Jonnie says - at the very least, a great way to improve attentiveness to a lecture, and a good example of the importance of creating interactivity in learning. There's more in Johnnie's item about what works in facilitation (flexibility rather than formulae). Following the Thiagi link led to a lot of free workshop games. Insight and goodies too. Thanks.
Earlier Can we learn collaboration just by listening
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