Active learning is a mostly meaningless educational buzzword. It’s a feel-good, intuitively popular term that indicates concern for student learning and success, but at some point we must admit that it lacks any useful definition and is holding back progress on teaching.
It is now well-known that good online courses should make use of the world of free, high-quality educational videos available on nearly any topic. It is also well-known that interaction with lesson content, in which students must think about the lesson material while going
Active learning in small groups has, at best, a mixed reputation. Instructors voice concerns about unequal levels of participation, students rushing through activities to leave or log off early, difficulties in assessing effort and learning, and the fact that many students arrive in class not
This fall, faculty will face an increased range of preparation in their students. If you’ve been teaching awhile, you have a sense of the degree to which your students are differently prepared: some know the conventions of citation better than others; some have greater spatial
Why don’t more college instructors use active learning? Research shows that active learning increases student achievement and retention and can enhance diversity in STEM programs by narrowing the achievement gap for traditionally underrepresented students (Theobald et al., 2020). While active learning use among college instructors
Nearly all teachers today use PowerPoint or Google Slides presentations to accompany their synchronous lessons. At the same time, students have laptops, tablets, or smartphones open during face-to-face classes. This offers teachers the option of adding interactions to their lessons by inserting slides with questions,
We learn best by returning to the same content over and over, reflecting on it each time to deepen our understanding. This is because knowledge is stored as patterns of neuroconnections in the brain, and those connections are strengthened each time that pattern is activated
I recently reviewed an active learning workshop, and that’s gotten me wondering about active learning strategies and where we are in our thinking about them. We do know the answers to two questions. First, active learning strategies work—not all the time or uniformly but regularly.
Expectations shape our responses. I come to supper thinking we’re having salmon, and instead it’s chicken thighs. I’m not smiling. A student studies for the exam, feels prepared, breezes through the questions, and anticipates a good grade. If the grade ends up a C, the
Why this article is worth discussing: A lot of us would wholeheartedly agree that active learning works. We have some familiarity with the research that supports it, and we’ve seen its positive effects in our classrooms. Done well, it engages students and overcomes the passivity
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