When Active Learning Goes Right (And Wrong) | How Learning Works

Video Overview & Insights

Active learning. What does it actually mean? And how can we leverage active learning to make teaching more effective? And finally, what kinds of "active learning" seem active but are actually a waste of time?

This video addresses each of these questions and provides a roadmap for you to create effective active learning experiences.

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00:00 Introduction

00:43 Active learning definition

02:13 Challenge 1: Lots of forms of active learning

02:44 Challenge 2: A lot of decision-making

03:40 Breaking down good active learning

03:56 Organizing knowledge

04:58 Recall and Application

06:06 Making Predictions (an aside - pulling stuff out of head is good)

07:18 Practice

07:49 Bad active learning; word search example

08:54 Good active learning

09:14 Geology example

12:19 Comment. Commenting's good.

On the general superiority of active learning techniques, there's this monster meta-analysis in the context of science classes: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410

Meta-analyses can be tricky to do right and even trickier to interpret, but this one is solid. It also dovetails with a lot of other research (look up: the testing effect, the generation effect, research on free recall, etc.).

A good resource for undergraduate instructors on incorporating active learning techniques in science classes is here (part of Carl Wieman's Science Education Initiative): https://cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/instructor

The free recall study I referenced is here:  https://mrbartonmaths.com/resourcesnew/8.%20Research/Memory%20and%20Revision/Retrieval%20practice%20more%20effective%20than%20studying.pdf

It’s a classic. I didn’t mention the fact that people misjudged how much they would remember with each technique (research participants thought they would remember more through re-study, not recall). This is also not just an isolated study. Lots and lots of research replicates this free recall effect and similar effects, like the generation effect, that illustrate this aspect of active learning.

If you read the study, there’s an additional group I didn’t mention - a concept map group. The concept map group did about as poorly as the re-study group, but I mentioned concept maps as a potential active learning technique. What's up with that? I'll do a video on concept maps at some point, but the short answer is that when you make the concept map while the study materials are in front of you, it's only marginally helpful. When you leverage free recall and make a concept map without the study materials with you, it's a lot more powerful.

Now, what extra boost the concept map buys you in addition to the straight-up free recall (no organizational schema at all) is an open question. But at the moment, I think it buys you something.

On “accepting explanations that sound reasonable,” see Frank Keil’s research on the illusion of explanatory coherence, like this piece: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog2605_1

Derek Muller, at the venerable and awesome Veritasium1 channel, did some research that touched on the same idea. Check out his fantastic explanation here: https://youtu.be/eVtCO84MDj8. His dissertation on the same topic can be found on his video description.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, I actually think Michelene Chi’s distinction between “active”, “constructive”, and “interactive” is a helpful way of thinking about things.

Her proposed breakdown is here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2008.01005.x

Sometimes we have to use the terms that people are using - and lots of people use the term "active learning," even though people don't necessarily mean the same thing by it. It's a poorly defined term, which is why I wanted to talk about what "good" active learning looks like.