Intervene early in the semester to address students' misperception that the cognitive effort of active learning signals poor learning¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 4 claims (4 for) · 3 studies (3 causal), q3 · 1 of 3 report an effect size · 3 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The authors recommend that instructors counter students' inherent bias against active learning at the start of the semester, by "explicitly presenting the value of increased cognitive efforts associated with active learning." They advise giving an examination or other assessment as early as possible so students can gauge their actual learning, adopting research-based explanation and facilitation strategies, encouraging hard work during activities, and soliciting frequent feedback such as one-minute papers throughout the course.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• The instructor must explicitly present evidence on fluency, feeling of learning, and actual learning early in the semester and give an early assessment so students can gauge their actual learning.

Constraints¶

• Without this preparation, students can be misled by the inherent disfluency of active learning, and their learning may be impaired during the initial part of the course.

Target Learners¶

• undergraduate students in large-enrollment introductory STEM courses new to fully student-centered active learning

Target Learning Goals¶

• accurate self-assessment of learning
• motivation and engagement during active learning

Claims¶

• Students in active classrooms reported lower feeling of learning than students in passive lectures (0.56 SD lower, P < 0.001) [+M]
• Students in active classrooms scored higher on tests of learning than students in passive lectures (0.46 SD higher, P < 0.001) [+M]
• Interviewed students described active classrooms as disjointed and frustrating and preferred the fluent passive lecture [+M]
• Fluent Illusions Mislead Self Assessment [+M]

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Deslauriers L., McCarty L. S., Miller K., Callaghan K., Kestin G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821936116