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.