When you throw a pass, only three things can happen, and two of 'em are bad. —Legendary Texas football coach Darrell Royal

What Coach Royal said about the forward pass applies equally to teaching the survey using traditional methods. When you teach a survey course relying on lectures and textbooks, three things can happen, and two of them are bad. You can bore the socks off students. Or you can hold students’ interest while inadvertently conveying deep misconceptions about what it means to be good at history. Occasionally, with some students, you might manage to pass on some worthwhile information. But research suggests this happens less often than professors like to think.

• Are you teaching a traditional “coverage” survey?
• A bad result when history is covered
• A worse result when history is covered
• The best result we can expect from coverage surveys