For the beginner:

I have gone so far down the path of figuring out how to use active learning effectively in a classroom that I was more than a bit taken aback recently. I had to defend the reasoning behind active learning for understanding material, for acquiring skills (which we do a lot in our one-off sessions), but also for understanding important concepts in a field. This is especially true when you are trying to change thinking and patterns about things the learners feel or think are true. Everything isn’t on google, the world is complicated, etc., etc.

While we might change our minds in another 10 years, here is what we know now:

Across STEM fields and at all levels, students fail less and learn more when the classes involve more active learning and less lecture. Female students and  those from disadvantaged backgrounds do even better in active learning classes than traditional lectures.

“The authors examined two outcome measures: the failure rate in courses and the performance on tests. They found the average failure rate decreased from 34% with traditional lecturing to 22% with active learning (Fig. 1A), whereas performance on identical or comparable tests increased by nearly half the SD of the test scores (an effect size of 0.47).”

and

“However, in undergraduate STEM education, we have the curious situation that, although more effective teaching methods have been overwhelmingly demonstrated, most STEM courses are still taught by lectures—the pedagogical equivalent of bloodletting. Should the goals of STEM education research be to find more effective ways for students to learn or to provide additional evidence to convince faculty and institutions to change how they are teaching? Freeman et al. do not answer that question, but their findings make it clear that it cannot be avoided.”

from Wieman, C. E. (2014). Large-scale comparison of science teaching methods sends clear message. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8319–8320. doi:10.1073/pnas.1407304111

Referring to this work: Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., … Bruce Alberts, by. (n.d.). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. doi:10.1073/pnas.1319030111

Classrooms

Active learning in classrooms designed for it. I wish there were more references here, but it seems clear that students are happier in active learning classrooms. And they think they are learning more (perceived learning). Likely, there is some study that has better data about actual learning  and interactivity (see slide 12). I am not sure what higher-order active learning might refer to.