Article: Instructional Strategies
Planning for Active Learning Strategies that Work Well with Lectures
The Scholarly Teacher
Todd’s
Recommendation
The Scholarly Teacher shares short articles designed to introduce a topic. I wrote this article to suggest ways of thinking about how best to add active learning strategies to a course, rather than just "do more active learning."
An extraordinary amount of research shows clearly that augmenting lectures with some form of active learning enhances student learning. In a meta-analysis of 225 studies, Freeman and his colleagues (2014) at the University of Washington found the average score on exams to be 6% higher when active learning was included in the course. The researchers also found that students were 1.5 times more likely to fail when faculty members lectured nearly all the time. More recently, Theobald and colleagues (2020), also at the University of Washington, noted that adding active learning exercises into a STEM course narrowed gaps in passing rates between majority and underrepresented minority students by 45%.
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