What Is Active Learning?: Carouseling 1 Print Out of Each Page

What is Active Learning?
Active learning refers to a broad range of teaching strategies which engage

students as active participants in their learning during class time with their
instructor. Typically, these strategies involve some amount of students working
together during class, but may also involve individual work and/or reflection.
These teaching approaches range from short, simple activities like journal writing,
problem solving and paired discussions, to longer, involved activities or
pedagogical frameworks like case studies, role plays, and structured team-based
learning.
In a “traditional” class, it is common for only some students in a given course to

participate in asking or responding to questions. In contrast, classes with successful
active learning activities provide an opportunity for all students in a class to think
and engage with course material and practice skills for learning, applying,
synthesizing, or summarizing that material.
Using active learning strategies does not require abandoning the lecture format.
Rather, adding small active learning strategies can make lecturing more effective
for student learning. These activities give students just a minute or two to check
their understanding of recent material, practice a skill or highlight gaps in their
knowledge before giving an explanation.
Active learning is an easy and remarkably robust teaching method that functions
well in every conceivable academic setting. Even large classrooms can involve
learning activities beyond the traditional lecture format.
Example "active" activities include: class discussion, small group discussion,

debate, posing questions to the class, think-pair-share activities, short written
exercises and polling the class (Bonwell and Eison, 1991). A class discussion may
be held in person or in an online environment. It is best that these discussions be
centered on an open-ended (occasionally controversial) topic (e.g. one that has no
right or wrong answer). A short written exercise that is often used is the "one
minute paper." In this exercise students are asked to summarize the day's
discussion in a short paper to be turned in before the end of class. This is a good
way to review materials.
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Why incorporate active learning techniques?
The benefits of active learning have been supported time and again. By comparing
student learning gains in introductory physics courses, Richard Hake was able to
show that interactive courses were over two times as effective in promoting
conceptual understanding as compared to traditional ones (Hake, 1998).
A recent analysis reported results from 225 studies, comparing traditional lecture
to active learning. In general, students’ average exam scores were shown to
improve by around 6% in active learning classes. Additionally, students involved
in traditional lecture were found to be 1.5 times more likely to fail as compared to
those in classes with significant active learning.
It takes time and creativity to effectively incorporate active learning strategies into
teaching and achieve the full benefits across instructional settings and disciplines.
Active learning can easily and effectively be incorporated into existing courses and
materials without the need for a dramatic fixing of the course.
Research suggests that audience attention in lectures starts to wane every 10-20
minutes. Incorporating active learning techniques once or twice during a 50-minute
class will encourage student engagement.
Active learning also reinforces important material, concepts, and skills; teachers
and students get more one-on-one interaction; provides more frequent and
immediate feedback to students and addresses different student learning styles.
It also provides students with an opportunity to think about, talk about, and process
course material; creates personal connections to the material for students, which
increases their motivation to learn; allows students to practice important skills,
such as collaboration, through pair and group work and builds self-esteem through
conversations with other students.
In fact, it creates a sense of community in the classroom through increased student-

student and instructor-student interaction which helps to maintain student
concentration and deepens learning towards the higher-level skills like critical
thinking.

Principles of Active Learning
Learning involves the active construction of meaning by the learner. This well-

established principle involves the fact that students link new information with
information that they already know. If the old information is faulty, the learning of
new information will be affected.
Learning facts and learning to do something are two different processes. This
explains why students can know a set of facts and still be unable to apply those
facts to solve a problem. If students are to successfully use knowledge, they must
have opportunities to practice and obtain feedback.
A variety of other instructional advices follow from this principle, including the
fact that students who are learning to solve problems need to know more than
whether the answer is right or wrong. The sequence of problems from easy to hard
is also important. Students should only move to harder problems as they improve.
Moving students too fast or before they are ready compromises their efforts to
learn.
Individuals are likely to learn more when they learn with others than when they
learn alone. Many faculty members are very independent learners and so struggle a
bit with accepting this principle. However, it is based on “impressive results” in
different disciplines “that support the power of getting students to work together to
learn.”
Meaningful learning is collaboration by articulating explanations, whether to one’s
self, peers, or teachers. Students learn to speak the languages of disciplines when
they practice speaking those languages. That’s part of what this principle involves,
but it is also true that articulating an answer, an idea, or a level of understanding
aids in learning. The speaking or writing makes clear to the learner what they do
and don’t understand, and/or their understanding deepens as they frame a
description that is meaningful to them.

How to Encourage Active Learning
Making explicit connections between course material and students’ lives outside
the classroom enables them to engage more deeply with the disciplinary content
and become invested in it. When students recognize the value of a course and can
see concrete examples of how it connects to a bigger picture, they are better
equipped to appreciate the abstract concepts and better able to learn the material.
One possibility for actively engaging learning is assigning students projects,

including community service projects, which engage them in the local community,
experiencing local resources and conversations. Drawing links between academic
material and their local environment can make the classroom and the community
more meaningful to students, and incorporating relevant volunteer projects can
enrich class discussions and student projects. Community-based learning is a key
part of the Georgetown experience as part of the university's mission to educate
“men and women for others.”
Another way to increase student engagement is to ask students to reflect on their

learning and make integrative connections across courses and disciplines. Building
an Portfolio or keeping an online journal, especially one that encourages students’
sense of ownership, can help inspire students to invest time and pride in their work.
Active learning has the potential to create a lively and instructive classroom
environment. If you conduct it with something monotonous, it can quickly become
as monotonous as straight lecturing. The key is to mix things up. Vary the type of
activity (answering questions, beginning problem solutions, taking the next step in
a problem solution or derivation, brainstorming, etc.); the activity duration (five to
fifteen minutes); the interval between activities (five to fifteen minutes); and the
size of the groups (one to four students).
If your students can never be sure what you’re going to do next, you have a good
chance of holding their attention for the entire class session. So add prediction
activities (pictures description, KWL).

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What is Active Learning?

Active learning refers to a broad range of teaching strategies which engage

In a “traditional” class, it is common for only some students in a given course to

Example "active" activities include: class discussion, small group discussion,

Carouseling 1 print out of each page

In fact, it creates a sense of community in the classroom through increased student-

Carouseling 1 print out of each page

Learning involves the active construction of meaning by the learner. This well-

Carouseling 1 print out of each page

One possibility for actively engaging learning is assigning students projects,

Another way to increase student engagement is to ask students to reflect on their

Carouseling 1 print out of each page

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