Aki points us to this article by some Harvard physics teachers, “Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom,” which begins:
Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning.
Here’s what they did:
We compared students’ self-reported perception of learning with their actual learning under controlled conditions in large-enrollment introductory college physics courses taught using 1) active instruction (following best practices in the discipline) and 2) passive instruction (lectures by experienced and highly rated instructors).
And here’s what they found:
Students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. . . . these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning.
My response: Interesting. Lots of the teaching literature is done by physicists. Maybe one reason for this is that intro physics is very standard. With intro stat, we’re still arguing about what should be taught. In intro physics, that’s all agreed, so they can instead argue more about how to teach it. Regarding the paper itself, I’m skeptical, but I’d like to believe its conclusions!
Just to elaborate on my views here:
– It makes sense to me that students learn more in active classrooms. I believe in this so much that I just (with Aki) wrote an entire book on how to teach applied statistics using active learning.
– I love active learning so much—and at the same time I understand the process of learning so poorly—that I have to be careful not to automatically believe a story that makes active learning look good, and this paper fits into that category.
– Active learning indeed takes more effort from the student as well as from the teacher. I can well believe that students can get annoyed at active learning and that in the short term they would prefer a more passive experience where they can jus sit in the classroom and zone out for an hour.
– I can also believe that students in active classrooms learned more. Especially in physics classes, where it’s super clear what is needed to be learned, and especially in an elite environment such as Harvard, where it’s not enough to just be able to get the right answers for standard problems but students also have to think creatively on exams.
– I’m not convinced by the authors’ speculation that students take increased cognitive effort as signifying poorer learning. I’d find it more plausible to believe that active learning involves lots of struggle, a process that makes students aware of much that they don’t know.
– This also suggests to me that active learning could be more effective it it had more reassurance, for example adding some drills at the end with straightforward tasks practicing what was learned during the class period. If increased cognitive effort is taken to signify poorer learning, then, yeah, that’s a big problem. But if the perception of poorer learning is just arising from sitting in class and getting confused over and over, then maybe we could remedy this by having the experience be less frustrating, with more positive reinforcement.
Also, a high perception of learning is not necessarily such a good thing! Especially for Harvard students, who already might have a tendency toward overconfidence. To put it another way, if one of the outcomes of the active classes is a lower average perception of learning, maybe that’s a good thing. Knowing what you don’t know is an important part of knowing.
This all reminds of something my dad told me once, which is that you learn the most from your mistakes. Or, more specifically, you learn when you make a mistake and then you find out it was a mistake. Not quite “positive psychology” but I believe it. At least, that’s how it’s worked for me. And for Lakatos.
Certainly there is nothing wrong with conducting and reporting such research. Yet I found it disturbing. First, no mention was made about whether the Harvard student results are generalizable to other populations – I know my son (who was an exceptionally strong student) mostly hated group work because he found it time-consuming and bogged down by students who had not prepared. In the courses I teach – with students who are not a motivated or proficient, I find active group work much better received. So, their conclusions seem like an over-reach to me.
Also, they suggest reasons for their principal finding – that students perceive active learning to be less effective than lecture-based learning despite the opposite being true – and they do some further analysis to suggest which of these reasons might be true. But that whole section strikes me as and example of one of the major NHST complaints we have repeatedly seen on this blog. They reject the null hypothesis of no difference, and use this to support their preferred theory for why there is a difference. I say “support” rather than “prove” since they did some further analysis of the reasons for their findings (although the sample size of 17 for that research seems thin, at best).
I don’t mean to suggest that this research is badly done, nor that it isn’t useful. But I found it disturbing that they suggest stronger conclusions than warranted. They rely a lot on the prior literature as to what constitutes “best practice” for active learning, but as with their use of Harvard students, they don’t seem to recognize that their choice of active learning techniques might not generalize to other techniques or to other measures of results (i.e., different testing methods) or to other students.
Dale:
I agree. I liked the overall message regarding active learning but I didn’t like how the article jumped from empirical findings to story time. Some blame goes to the authors, some to the reviewers for not calling them on it, and some to the selection bias whereby bigger claims are more likely to appear in top journals and get attention. Adding “in Harvard physics classes” to the title of the paper would make it more accurate but surely less likely to get published and noticed.
“…mostly hated group work because he found it time-consuming and bogged down by students who had not prepared”
Badabing!!!!
IOW, this is a teaching strategy for students who don’t work. It caps the progress of the top students. This is why the overall value of university education is declining.
Another difference between most “new education” and “old education” strategies is that the “new education” focuses exclusively on the content of the class, and doesn’t measure or teach many of the other skills that came with “old education” like writing and study skills.
Last but not least, a few years ago I heard a prof on NPR provide a succinct analysis of “active learning”. He claimed that students “learn more of what we want them to learn”. IOW, the overall content and total learning aren’t important, what’s important is the few specifics of “what we want them to learn”. In curricula I’ve seen, “what we want them to learn” is dramatically reduced from the breadth that my undergrad courses expected me to learn.
Chipmunk:
That doesn’t describe the active learning in classes that I teach!
Andrew:
I said: “Active teaching…doesn’t measure or teach many of the other skills that came with “old education” like writing and study skills. ”
How do you measure writing and study skills development?
In this paper, “At the end of each class period, students completed… a multiple-choice TOL.” There is absolutely no effort to measure study or writing skills. They are completely ignored.
Also see my comments below regarding the strawman of comparing against a “pure” lecture course.
I’d also add that solving math problems is an idea situation for an “interactive” course. How much of that goes on in botany, psychology, geology etc?
I would disagree on the effects on top students. One of the best ways to go from being good to excellent is to teach it to another. Often times while helping classmates who were struggling with material I was competent with, I would discover my own weakness and would then work to fix them so I could help a classmate. In the end, extra repletion, having to reword or approach material in a different direction, or providing useful examples would improve my work and that of the student I was helping.
This isn’t what the data presented shows. The students in the active group answered 1 extra multiple choice question (out of 12) correctly on average.
Perhaps more students tested better than not, but maybe a few tested much higher while most were slightly lower, etc.
Then there is the issue of how well answering one additional multiple choice question correctly reflects “learning”.
Some other shortcomings of the study:
1) The existing course – like most courses in real life – “…would likely be classified as interactive lecture” IOW, the “lecture” students were forced to endure an unrealistic situation with *nothing* but lecture. This isn’t a “standard” or common teaching method! Very few courses have lecture with no demonstration or questions or interaction other than talking by the prof!
2) This measures only a third of the course. The rule of thumb for most courses is 2hr study for every hour of class. How would the two groups fare after two hours of additional study per hour of course time? This is a critical question because
a) students often study together, and thus are “interactive”
b) “interactive” – e.g. discussion and conversation – is a slow and sloppy way to communicate precise information. That’s why we invented writing, and that’s one reason scientific and legal records are written and not spoken. A lecture is a form of “written conversation” because the lecturer can speak precisely from notes.
This is where the strongest students – those with high reading comprehension, and those who work at building study skills – would excel and drive the averages up.
One other possible reason: My experience is that with a passive method, you can cover a lot more ground in a single lecture than when trying to make students active. Just saying something is way faster than letting students to figure it out (plus active learning has some overhead in organizing the students). Sure, students often don’t remember much of the extra content, but could IMHO plausibly explain part of the results – the study tries to control for this and both groups have roughly the same content, but since the overall time is reported as identical in both cases (unless I am missing something), I find it quite plausible that the passive treatment resulted in the instructor delivering more information (e.g. extra connections to other material, extra notes on practical uses, …).
So students in the passive condition know they received more information, so assume they learned more, while actually forgetting (or not being tested on) the extra stuff. In the active condition, the students feel like they just did a few small exercises so assume they didn’t learn much (even if in fact they actually remember/can recreate more of the relevant knowledge)
More generally, I am repeatedly struck how little content can you actually teach in a class (regardless of method) if you really want students to learn it vs. how much content you can cram into a class.
Martin:
I’m a big believer in covering ground; I just prefer to do it using textbook or videos so that valuable classroom time can be used for active learning, which can’t easily be done otherwise. This is also called the flipped classroom, and it does require that students do some reading or watch videos outside of class.
Let me address online classes (how much this carries over to in-person classes is an exercise left to the reader). In my experience, breakout groups are the “killer app” of online classes. However, they illustrate the issues very clearly: having students work in groups online takes time – more time than many people realize (it is almost impossible to get a group of students to virtually do anything meaningful in less than 30 minutes). This makes the choice of how much content vs active pedagogy a stark one. Lecturing online is mostly a disaster. For me, the solution is to prerecord “lecture” material and use class time more actively. This may be my solutions to their prior assignment, hopefully with student comments and questions. When possible, it involves some carefully designed breakout group assignment that will take up a bunch of class time – and where I serve as consultant as they work in groups.
I won’t pretend that I do this well. Indeed, I have colleagues who make me feel embarrassed by how well they accomplish this. But I will claim that I know what I’m striving for. And creating meaningful group work in an online class – that doesn’t waste prepared students time – is not simple. It is my goal, sometimes achieved and often not. When it works, it is wonderful. So I actually believe in “active” learning, and group work can play an important role if well designed and executed – a nontrivial task.
Oh, yeah, I absolutely detest online classes, and breakout rooms never worked for me. When I was teaching online, I just did straight lecturing, and I don’t think it went as well as active classes.
Yup I hate on-line classes.
I really enjoyed teaching in the first Covid year of full non-face-to-face teaching (2020-2021). For the course I taught I gave three 20 min lectures a week, each lecture accompanied by a pre-lecture and post-lecture task to introduce and consolidate the lecture material with active learning investigations. The course also had a self-guided assessed piece of coursework that the students could do in their own time as they liked (e.g. working together or alone if they preferred).
Anything involving breakout rooms were rubbish in my experience – the students were suddenly confronted with a group of students they didn’t know and usually only one or two of the students in each room participated meaningfully.
In first year courses (and a little in year 2) pre- and post-Covid, group-workshops work really well IMO. We expect students will work in groups but if anyone prefers to sit and work alone that’s OK. Other than research projects I find these some of the most enjoyable parts of teaching – wandering around and chatting to students.
I like traditional lectures but the idea that one would go into a lecture hall and just read stuff from notes seems quite ridiculous ‘tho I can see how that might be relevant for some subjects (e.g. maths). A lecture should be at least a little of a performance.
Andrew wrote: “…students can get annoyed at active learning and that in the short term they would prefer a more passive experience where they can jus sit in the classroom and zone out for an hour.”
That was me in school. I really had trouble paying attention during lectures, unless the lecturer was exceptionally engaging (which was rare). When I was in school, there was no such thing as smartphones, so I wasn’t being distracted by technology. My attention span just couldn’t handle it. In many cases, I would skip the lectures altogether. I preferred learning from the textbook or other reading materials. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this strategy to others, but it always worked well for me.
Oh, and I hated group projects. I felt like I could do a better job if I did the whole project on my own.
I’m almost absolutely certain that a completely “passive learning” classroom is a waste of time. If a lecturer is going to go up there and read pages from straight from the textbook or from a script, why not just give me the textbook or the script? It’s more precise, I can stop and go back. Or if you’re the sort of person that needs a face and a voice, why not just record the reading? Both of these are quite obviously less expensive for the lecturer and the students. The only way a live lecture like that provides marginal value is in the psychological effect of being in a room with a live speaker. I suppose that might be significant in a smaller class but I’m pretty sure it’s not important once class sizes get to 100 or more.
So, I think doing some “non-passive” learning is a minimal requirement to improve over the baseline of “hand me a textbook and maybe some videos.” But you could go in any direction with that, some of them worse than nothing. It’s hard for me to understand a statement like
A teacher could spend their lectures aggressively interrogating their students about the subject, then berate and publicly humiliate them for their lack of knowledge about a subject they have not yet been taught. That would be an “active classroom” with lots of interactive participation.
As for the professors that keep their head down and read a textbook for a continuous hour, I didn’t think most of them believed they were providing marginal value; they would probably rather have sent us recordings or textbook chapters and saved everyone the effort., but had to lecture because of departmental or university policy. But some professors would mandate attendance, then just read continuously; I never understood that at all.
A lecture is sequential access, while a book is random access. In fact random access information transmission was a huge advance historically:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex
So unless you plan on asking the lecturer/students questions (a form of random access), it really makes no sense to go to class (psychological quirks like getting yourself to focus/etc aside).
Anon:
It depends on the student. In my courses, attending class gives students a chance to practice working on problems and to discuss ideas with each other. In theory this could be done outside of class but in practice it can be helpful to have an assigned time to do this, in the same way that it can be good to have a regular appointment at the gym. You can call this a psychological quirk but I think this is a common issue, not really a quirk at all. It also solves the coordination problem of getting lots of students in the same room together so they can work together. Also, I can answer questions that come up. Again, yes, in theory this can be done online, but it’s a lot more pleasant to have a conversation than to do everything via typing (which I already do enough of, as here!).
“You can call this a psychological quirk ”
almost sounds like a nudge, and we know how powerful those are
Well, sure. If you ask questions and discuss with others you will learn far more than simply listening to the lecture.
When in school, I was surprised how many students never asked a single question. I would just study at home if that was my approach. Perhaps they could still benefit from other students asking questions though.
Annelid (oops; typo?) said, “When in school, I was surprised how many students never asked a single question”.
I rarely asked questions in school — especially in math or science classes, because they were mostly boys, with just one or two girls. I still had difficulty with the idea of asking questions in class when I was in graduate school. But on one occasion, I dared to do so: the professor had stated a theorem and was trying to prove it, but a counterexample came to my mind. I hesitated for a few minutes, but finally got the gumption to raise my hand, and give the counterexample. The professor listened, and agreed that it was indeed a counterexample. Since it was almost the end of class, and tea was scheduled for right after that class period, he said, “Class over! Let’s all go to tea now!”. When we got to tea, he came up to me and said, “Thank you for pointing out that counterexample; if you hadn’t, I would have stood there even longer looking like a fool.” (I should add that his wife was a mathematician, and a very good one.)
Anon:
You write, “If you ask questions and discuss with others you will learn far more than simply listening to the lecture.”
Exactly! That’s why in my teaching, I require students to talk with each other in class. Rather than pausing the lecture and issuing a general, “Any questions?”, I’ll pause and ask the students to talking with each other for two minutes and discuss any questions they have. I’ll then look around the room, and if anyone’s sitting alone not talking, I’ll look them in the eye and make yapping motions with my hands to indicate that they have to join a pair and start yapping.
I do this because, when I didn’t do it, students would sit passively in class and stare into space.
Many people have been confused about why it’s so difficult to get students to talk. I’m sure that with the whole “everyone goes to college” movement, there’s a rise in students who are narrowly “smart” enough to be where they are but not scholarly by disposition. The presence of those folks who don’t care about their education probably plays a role. But the primary reason is, as Martha points out, some kind of social anxiety.
Asking a question in class is not just a question, it is also a social performance. If you’re following along very well, you don’t want to ask a question that’s too deep; it can come across as showing off or self centered to distract the class with an inquiry that’s not necessary for the main point. If you’re not following, you don’t want to ask a question that’s too shallow and reveal to everyone that you don’t understand or aren’t listening. If the professor asks a question and tells you to turn to your neighbor and discuss it, you don’t want to immediately have the answer and ruin the point of the exercise for your neighbor. If you don’t have any clue how to answer, you also don’t have an easy way to participate, and, again, don’t want to reveal that you haven’t been following. In a group project, on top of skill disparities, someone needs to be the de factor leader. There needs to be someone that asks the questions, “where do we meet, when do we meet, how often, who wants to do this, who wants to do that.” Often, random assignment ends up with a bunch of people without that personality, not wanting to appear domineering or dictatorial, sitting around waiting for someone to take charge.
All of this gets worse as class sizes get larger. People get more scared to speak. Every interaction with a neighbor becomes a first and only impression.
Of course, once you get a job, especially outside of academia, you find that just about every nontrivial human endeavor is collaborative and therefore social. Best to get over it quick.
There’s also a cultural overlay on the issue of asking questions and talking to other students. In some cultures, the very idea of students learning through the process of discussing material with other students is a foreign concept (pun intended). Asking questions of unstructiors can be considered rude or self-centered (why would you interrupt the teacher, if you dinner understand something that’s on you). I’ve had students from underrepresented groups explain to me that for them
a lack of interactive participation in discussions isn’t a sign of disinterest or a lack of engagement, but the idea of having a teacher asking them for their viewpoint wasn’t something they expect.
Martha –
The “dinner” was for you.
I can’t imagine paying $10k for access to Andrew, et al and then staring into space rather than getting everything I possibly can from the experience. It makes no sense, but lots of people do it.
There are other reasons for going to class – when I was at uni the lecturers would say things like ‘it is really important to understand this material’ which was code for ‘this will be on the exam’.
You should look at their paper on the mastery difference using their method vs traditional.
https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/322979/mod_resource/content/1/deslauriers-science-2011.pdf
Especially Figure 1 on test outcomes. These are U of BC students, not Harvard students.
About 5 years ago, I was on a plane and my seat mate pulled out an advanced quantum mechanics book. Given his age, I asked, “Are you a physics professor.” It was Deslauriers and he then spent the 5 hour flight from SFO to BOS walking me through their research. I came away thinking that there’s no excuse not to convert all initial sequence university science, engineering, and math classes to this format.
Isn’t that going to involve an awful lot of 5 hour flights??
Kevin:
I agree on the substance, just not on some of the claims in the article.
I understand that. But it seems like the potential magnitude of adopting the technique–the median mastery of the treatment group is 90-95th percentile of the control–was a high order bit that it would have made sense for you to at least mention. (Yes, yes, the effect is probably overstated.)
It motivates why identifying the source of discomfort is important and thus why your disagreement on those claims isn’t mere quibbling.
I remember this paper from our science teaching journal club. It’s quite good (unlike much of the science teaching literature). The point about the non-representative student body is important, but if anything I’d expect the effect to be stronger for more typical students.
Student resistance to active learning is very real. In addition to the reasons proposed, I’ll suggest that not wanting to actively participate is a manifestation of not wanting to be in college at all, for which I don’t blame the students; society pushes nearly everyone into higher education, while at the same time not actually caring to assess or demand learning.
My class today, I thought, went very well — a lot of poll questions for the class, a demo in which they had to predict the outcome, and a lot of convincing your neighbors of right/wrong answers to things. More than usual, the atmosphere was great. On the flip side, perhaps 25% of the students didn’t show up, despite there not being a textbook or recordings — see paragraph 2. But that’s another issue…
I wonder what would happen if you told students that, then had them all put on “thinking caps” or something.
I’ve got no problem with these ideas in principle, but this research is very sloppy.
Related to what Martin wrote above – I suspect there’s some circularity here – as students might feel that covering a lot of material (despite a more shallow and shorter-lasting mastery) means doing a lot of learning.
IIIRC, there’s research showing that students schooled in the standard pedagogical paradigm tend to view “learning” as passive process and think that the responsibility for measuring learning rests in the unstructor’s hands, not their own.
It doesn’t seem to me to make sense to evaluate these questions unless you’re doing a sophisticated and longitudinal assessment of both (1) what students “learned” and their self-perceptions about the amount and quality of their learning.
I have little doubt that aside from the typical claptrap about the inferiority of “active leaning” (see Chipmunk above) most people who reflect back on their own learning in academic as well as other environments, will agree that “active learning” (as a broad class. Definitions really need to be fleshed out here – context prolly matters) was superior.
“I have little doubt that aside from the typical claptrap about the inferiority of “active leaning” (see Chipmunk above)”
Hilarioius!!! Talk about “claptrap”!!
As a student, I participated in extensive active learning: I regularly rewrote and illustrated my lecture notes, which regularly generated questions, which led me regularly to take advantage of office hours and study sessions to get answers to my questions. In the course of doing those things, I spent many more hours involved in active learning than any student would in a “flipped” classroom.
All these forms of active learning are readily available and have long been in use by people motivated to succeed. You’re absolutely right though, most students want to succeed without doing anything. But there’s nothing in the “standard pedagogical paradigm” that encourages that, in fact just the opposite, competent teachers, instructors and profs strongly encourage students to work on their own and provide materials and suggestions to help.
In the paper referred to here, the difference between “pure active” and the strawman “pure lecture” model is still <10%, and that's before students go home to review notes. Why didn't they compare "active" to the lecture/active blend course that's the *normal* way the course (and most science) is taught? Why didn't they test the students a week later? Because the difference would be too small for detection. (by the way I love the error bars on those graphs! hilarious, generated by active learners no doubt).
No doubt: "active learning" is about learning more. Of what we want them to learn.
chipmunk –
> “I have little doubt that aside from the typical claptrap about the inferiority of “active leaning” (see Chipmunk above)”
> As a student, I participated in extensive active learning: …
Your own (anecdotal) experiences aren’t irrelevant – but nor are they particularly useful for addressing the more general topic at hand. I would offer that you’re likely an outlier in many respects. To understand the more general phenomena at hand, you should refer to the available evidence – perhaps informed by your personal experience but not replaced by).
> I regularly rewrote and illustrated my lecture notes, which regularly generated questions, which led me regularly to take advantage of office hours and study sessions to get answers to my questions. In the course of doing those things, I spent many more hours involved in active learning than any student would in a “flipped” classroom.
That’s great for you. You seem to have been an “active learner,” and for whatever reason inclined to take control over your own learning process. But the bottom line is that evidence shows at a large % of students who are schooled within the standard paradigm are not active leaners. They tend to look at learning (at least in a school setting) as a passive process (in balance) and so then the point (IMO) is how to effectively mitigate that condition, in a way that’s effective for as many students as possible. Of course there’s going to be variability there. No one methodology will work for all students and you have to be flexible accordingly. But your methodology and pedagogy should be informed by what we know about what works more generally, or what works most generally for students with different approaches to learning.
For me, as a teacher, the goal on top of everything else is to activate and help students to have control over their own learning process, by employing a metacognitive approach to their own learning, Content matter for me is generally a pathway to achieve that goal.
> All these forms of active learning are readily available and have long been in use by people motivated to succeed.
Of course! But there’s nothing mutually exclusive between that and what I wrote!!!
> You’re absolutely right though, most students want to succeed without doing anything.
I suspect this statement of yours reflects the difference at the core of our views. I don’t think most students “want” to succeed without doing anything. That’s an illogical conclusion, IMO, and doesn’t remotely reflect my experiences in decades of teaching across many different kinds of contexts. Why would students “want’ to employ sub-optimal leaning techniques when much more advantageous leaning techniques are available for their use? They would learn more. They would be more successful in life. They would make more money. They would find more interesting work. They’d be generally more well-rounded people. Why would people “want” to walk away from all of that!?!?!?!?!
> But there’s nothing in the “standard pedagogical paradigm” that encourages that, in fact just the opposite, competent teachers, instructors and profs strongly encourage students to work on their own and provide materials and suggestions to help.
Here again, we differ. From decades of experience as a teacher, I think that the fact that most students view learning as a passive process is largely a function of the disfunction of the standard paradigm. Yes, often teachers do encourage students to be active learners – but the paradigm itself often delivers a contradictory message. I could break that down in many ways, but perhaps the most obvious is that the system is set up for teachers to tell students what to do, and then have students follow those instructions, and then pass over responsibility for assessment to the teachers (in a kind of black box). The focus in on grades rather than the learning in and of itself. And for many students, the end result is that they think that success or failure is a product of personal character or cognitive traits, rather than an outcome of a more or less metacognitive process.
A little story. One time I was working at an education school at a prestigious university that had to begin dealing with a problem where a lot of students were cheating. Many meetings were held, and the focus was almost exclusively on enforcement and how to set up systems to prevent students from cheating. Almost none of the discussion was on dealing with why there was such a widespread view on the part of the students that cheating would in some fashion be a pathway to success within the institution.
> In the paper referred to here, …
I’m not going to get into the paper itself here. My point was related your claptrap about “active leaning,” and how ill-informed it was.
Some observations:
1) The statistical analysis apparently ignored completely potential dependence between students in the same class, which obviously can be a factor as they communicate with each other. I’d think that every experienced lecturer knows that there may be group effects such as a group of strongly motivated students setting an example followed by many others in the class.
2) My personal ideal of active learning gives more space to the ideas that the students bring in, rather than just having the aim of transmitting what’s “correct” or “wrong”; assessment would rather be project-based or at least using free form exams of the type “analyse these data”. In my view multiple choice assessments are to some extent in conflict with at least a certain philosophy of active learning. Multiple choice assessments can be drilled, and this can probably done well actively, but I’m very skeptical about whether what is assessed there is the kind of learning that I’d prefer.
3) I believe (and hear things to this effect from students) that the major reason for believing that not as much is learnt in “active learning” is the widespread idea that learning actually means “being told the right thing”. Students think they lose time listening to their fellow students who don’t know as much as the lecturer, and also being left alone with their own thinking which isn’t up to the standard of the lecturer (at least when it comes to the knowledge to be learnt). Why can’t this time be used for having the lecturer telling them more good and correct stuff, the students think. This is obviously not based on any evaluation of how quickly they forget what they were told by the lecturer, and particularly how “being told correct things” doesn’t give them the competence to apply them in a thoughtful way in practice (which I believe is at best very weakly assessed by multiple choice tests).
I have an personal anecdote about that. As an undergraduate, I had several professors that occasionally in their lecture took the class to a “wrong” path: when trying to prove a theorem or solve a problem, they would intentionally approach it in a way that might seem promising at first, but did not work. Then they would show us why it did not work, why did it seem like it might work, how can one tell that it is not working, how to recover at least something from it, and so on. I found it extremely valuable, and later I tried to so the same in my classes. Perhaps I did not communicate the intent as well as my professors did, because one time a student wrote an annoyed letter to the department chair, complaining that I waste my students’ time solving problems the wrong way, and that I should just show them the right way and be done with it.
Lahvak:
Yes, I’ve had that exact same complaint about my teaching! I guess I need to be clearer on when I’m saying that something is a bad idea. One challenge here is that students might not be paying attention the entire time in class, or might be paying attention but still get lost, so that it can be hard for them to follow the thread and keep track of when I’m suggesting a good idea and when I’m suggesting a bad idea. Another challenge is that, in statistics, many bad ideas are presented as good ideas, and so much of the learning in statistics classes is unlearning bad ideas that were previously taught. In that way, statistics resembles a social science such as history or economics more than it resembles a natural science such as mathematics or chemistry.
Another data point:
~2007 I was on an external review team that spent a week at SIngapore’s Republic Polytechnic, https://www.rp.edu.sg/,
whose students were typically 17-19-years old, i.e., 3-year course, equiv to HS Jr&Sr, 1st year of college.
– First week for everyone is “how to search the web and other sources and assess credibility of what you find.”
– uses extreme version of Problem-Based Learning, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning
– class = 5 teams of 5 students, all have laptops, minimal paper
– 5 courses/semester, course 1 is all day, each Monday, etc.
– Each day: short lecture + descriptions of problems, teams go work them, create Powerpoints, present to class in PM.
– At end of afternoon, there might be an individual quiz, or instructor might say “You all got this, but had trouble with that, so let’s go over that.”
– Every student gets a grade every day, also has to write paragraph saying how they did and what they learned
– I sat in on 17-year-olds learning Poisson arrival processes and 19-year-olds taking web-systems design from a part-time instructor, a woman who was a realtor. She was good, and if were still doing computing management, I’d have seriously thought of hiring some of these students for junior positions.
– Some instructors were permanent cadre who developed course materials, all online. Other instructors had to know the material, but did not need skillset to create courses, so more acted as coaches and evaluators.
– Of course, this was *Singapore* (which is not necessarily typical), and students weer typically 17-19-year-olds.
Faculty were quite explicit in saying they get academic 2nd and 3rd quartile students, many aiming to work afterwards, although some catch fire and successfully go on to university.
From observation, the students were very engaged. They could work in teams, which varied course by course, they could solve problems, presetn solutions, be critiqued by other students and critique others’ work, which they did gleefully.