This is a problem for everyone. People may not experience the struggle directly, but it's there. It's the inherent problem with any group class.
> I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand.
Tight loops of interaction will make this nearly impossible. What you'll have to watch out for instead is overwhelming students to the point of distress (speaking from experience).
Yes, this is my biggest gripe with learning as well. It's so individual that you almost need one teacher per student.
Well, it was astonishing when I read the news. Now, at the end of this crazy week, all I can think is "well of course they are!"
Otherwise yes, you are often better off with the book and homework and actually completing both.
And this is where I usually go off on my rant how college is useless for education - you can 'learn' peer interaction but even this way nothing forces you to make friends or connections, so the inherent use is close to nill.
I find classrooms engaging and I actually internalise information in a way that reading is only ever surface level.
(If you do Deaf Studies in Trinity College, University of Dublin, one of the lectures is on Deaf Culture, Perspectives on Deafness, Working with the Deaf Community. The lecturer is himself Deaf, and will lecture in ISL. There's an interpreter present to voice the lecture for the hearing students (and to interpret any questions, of course). In third year, you lose the interpreter. By that stage, you should be fluent enough in ISL from your ISL classes to no longer need one.)
I never went to my physics classes in college - there was no attendance requirement outside of lab and I saw no reason to since math and science were easy for me to grok on my own.
On the other hand, I also studied languages and classroom and face to face time is almost essential for in-depth language study. Language study isn't usually lecture based, though. Not going to my Chinese or Arabic classes would have been a bad time.
There were a few topics that I attended the lectures, either because the lecturer was very good or because no book was adequate. The subject was mathematics, but I knew people from other fields who approached study in a similar way.
You'll think you get it.
But there are questions that are about a deeper understanding. For these there's some point to the question that isn't obvious from just reading. I remember the first few question sheets I got in uni, there would be questions that appeared to have nothing to do with what was presented at all. Only by asking around did I discover what the cryptic connections were. If you don't do the question sheets, you won't see this.
That depends very much on the lecturer. If he or she just follows one book for the whole semester and doesn't add any additional insight, explanation of tradeoffs, or enlightening anecdotes, then by any means skip the lecture. But if you have a lecturer giving you all from above and the possibility to ask questions, lectures can be invaluable. Luckily I experienced many of the latter kind, although some of the first.
Things are complex: different students, lecturers, subject matters.
I did the opposite: only attended lectures (no study, no textbook, no exercises), but actively listened, thinking about it from different points of view in the lecture - and got the top mark, with a 5% gap to the next one. (But TBF I'd also primed myself, by sitting a previous exam under exam conditions, for motivation and guidance. I also spent half an afternoon before the exam, checking the text on four things I was unsure of, and one thing I didn't get at all.)
Maybe a lot of it is just engagement? Most students aren't interested. Even if they push themselves to the utmost, it's hard to compete with actual interest. It brings a different quality of attention.
I had two mathematics teachers in high school that took this approach to class time. They would lecture for 10 minutes then have the class do work in groups on homework assignments for the remaining 45 minutes. Exact times varied based on the complexity of the material, of course. And I do not believe their format was sanctioned by the administration. But it sure helped me retain more of the information.
As an extra bonus, it really helped with procrastination. It was a lot easier to get to work on an already-started homework assignment compared to staring at a blank page and a daunting list of problems.
* Some only "get it" when it's explained to them in a classroom, preferably by an engaging teacher; while others have to read it in the book.
* Many, perhaps most, won't really get it unless they do the homework; but others can do all of the exercises you give them, and still fail to get the bigger picture, and will be lost if faced with something slightly different than what they exercised.
I took this realisation to the extreme and decided to completely deprioritise classes in favour of homework and doing the reading in my own time. I figured the cost-benefit, at least for me, was much higher if I spent an hour doing as opposed to an hour listening.
This actually worked really well for me but that might also be because I often struggle with large classroom learning: the pace is either too slow and I get distracted or too fast and I can't keep up. But even when the learning is 'one-to-one' I feel like there's always the tendency for people to zone out and not raise an issue when they are either bored or did not keep up/understand.
I think you're right in that some of that might be the brain pretending that it understood when in fact it did not. Could it also be a social thing? Maybe because the other person expects you to understand and this causes your brain to try its best to believe that it understood when it did not.