From Content Transmission to Deep Learning: Successful Teaching Strategies in Higher Education a Structured Integrative Review of the Evidence and a Proposed Pedagogical Model for University Teaching

Abstract

Higher education faces a growing tension between the expansion of knowledge, the increasing diversity of the student population, digitalisation, and the persistence of teaching models centred primarily on lectures. This paper examines which teaching strategies have sufficient evidence to be considered successful and under what conditions they promote deep, durable, self-regulated, inclusive, and transferable learning. A structured integrative review with a scoping-review orientation was conducted, drawing on meta-analyses, systematic reviews, influential empirical studies, and documents issued by international organisations that were available through open access or verifiable bibliographic records. Sources were organised according to study design, quality of evidence, outcomes examined, and implementation conditions. The findings show consistent support for active learning, retrieval practice, and spacing; favourable but more design-dependent evidence for problem-based learning, formative assessment, feedback, and the teaching of self-regulation; and a still-emerging evidence base for Universal Design for Learning and generative artificial intelligence when evaluated in terms of causal effects on learning. The paper argues that success does not reside in any single methodology, but in the articulation of five mechanisms: activation of prior knowledge, cognitive elaboration, distributed practice, action-oriented feedback, and transfer. An integrative model for designing university learning experiences is proposed, and its implications for academic development, curriculum, assessment, and the institutional governance of innovation are discussed.