JANET RANKIN: Well, active
learning is the idea
that students, to
really learn something,
to really understand something
have to be actively involved
and that just sitting passively
and listening to a lecture
really doesn't help students
develop the higher order
cognitive processes that
they need to really,
really understand something.
So you can listen to something,
you can watch a movie,
you can watch TV, and you
can generally get the plot.
But if you're asked to
recall specific details
or to even explain a
particular nuance associated
with the TV show or movie,
you can't really do it.
And that's what happens
often in a lecture,
is that students will
sit in the lecture,
they'll write down
what's being said,
but they're not really
engaged with the material.
So active learning is this
idea of, people say minds on,
always hands on sometimes.
So students have to be actively
with their mind thinking
about the material,
applying what's being said,
and given opportunities
within the lecture
to apply what's being
taught or the topic at hand.
And then active learning,
strictly speaking
means that just one particular
individual is active.
Interactive, we tend to parse
that a little bit and say
interactive learning would mean
the student has been active
in his or her own mind in
thinking about the material,
but then is also interacting
with others, peers
or potentially the
faculty member or TA
in order to further
develop understanding,
construct meaning for the topic.
I always start maybe the
second session of the class.
The second class
meeting is a discussion
of what we know about
how people learn.
So a discussion
of the literature
and the research on human
cognition and learning.
And if you take a
constructivist point of view
or a constructionist point
of view, which really says
that as I said
before, to understand,
people have to make
meaning of a topic,
they have to construct
their own meaning.
And we show the research that
really shows that this is true.
For higher level
cognitive processes,
people have to be
actively engaged.
And there's research
to show that.
We also show the
classroom-based research,
so [? Freeman's ?]
2014 paper that
was a meta-analysis of
this 225 other studies that
showed that in courses, in
college-level courses where
active learning
was used, there was
a 12% decrease in
the failure rate.
And they normalized it to
all of the important factors
that they should
be normalized to--
the experience of
the instructor,
the size of the class, the
type of the institution,
the position that the class
is situated within the larger
curriculum.
And across the
board it was shown
that there was a 12% decrease
on average of the failure rate.
And they make a
comment in the paper
that if that had been a
clinical trial of a drug
and 12% of the people on
the drug had [? shown ?]
marked improvement, they would
have had to stop the trial
and give everyone the drug.
So this idea that there's a
12% decrease in the failure
rate in courses that use
active learning, to me
is pretty compelling
that we should all
be using active learning.
So whenever possible, because
our students are MIT students,
we use data, we
use the research,
and we try to find really good
research, solid research that
shows the way people
learn and then
how to support that with
specific classroom practices.
So many of the students
haven't had the experience
of being in a class where
active learning was used,
so they don't really
understand it.
So when we start to talk
about it as a way of teaching,
they may not really get it.
So throughout the course,
from the first class
all the way through,
I try to use
several different types
of active learning
exercises each class.
So the students
themselves are actively
engaged with the material
from the first day.
So I may have them
break into pairs
and discuss a particular
topic or identify
something they didn't understand
from the pre-class readings.
And then after three
minutes, they can either
share their comments
with someone else
or maybe we just report
out to the larger group.
If they just report, if they
just write down and then report
back, that's a pretty good
example of active learning.
It's pretty simple,
it's what you
might call low-hanging
fruit in terms
of what it takes for a
faculty member to do that.
So I'll do that, I'll
have them do that.
And then I step
back and say, OK,
why did I ask you
to think about it?
Why did I ask you to
take three minutes
before we had this discussion?
So I try to deconstruct
the exercise for them,
showing them the
advantages for the learner.
