Students in active learning environments learned more but felt they learned less, mistaking mental effort for failure¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · theoretical r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2025 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? Students in active learning environments learned more but felt they learned less, because mental effort was misinterpreted as failure. → Favero 2025

Evidence¶

Favero 2025¶

Favero, L., Pérez-Ortiz, J. A., Käser, T., & Oliver, N. (2025). Do AI tutors empower or enslave learners? Toward a critical use of AI in education. Applications of Generative AI to support teaching and learning in Higher Education, co-located with AIED 2025, Palermo, Italy. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06878 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.06878

q2 · i? · theoretical · r2

The paper reports, citing Deslauriers et al., that "students in active learning environments learned more but felt they learned less". This cognitive bias leads students to favor fluent, low-effort activities that give the illusion of learning; no effect size is printed.

"Interestingly, Deslauriers et al.[29] found that students in active learning environments learned more but felt they learned less. Mental effort was misinterpreted as failure, while smooth lectures mistakenly felt more effective, though they were not."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Students in active classrooms reported lower feeling of learning than students in passive lectures (0.56 SD lower, P < 0.001) — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Discussion promotes more active thinking than lecture, though lecture is no worse for transmitting information — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it

• Effortful, fluent-feeling experiences can create an illusion of learning: felt sense of learning is a poor gauge of actual learning — possibly the same claim (merge candidate)
• Rereading is less effective than retrieval practice — related
• Learners invest more effort in tasks they perceive as interesting, personally important, or useful to their future goals. — related
• Qualitative findings: students initially held inaccurate beliefs about strategy efficacy, and high effort from interleaved practice was misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning — related
• In a within-subjects category-learning experiment, students reported higher mental effort and lower concurrent judgments of learning during interleaved than during blocked studying — a narrower finding that bears on this claim