Does Active Learning Work?

Dr. Donna M. Qualters uncovers some interesting information in her research study Do Students Want to be Active? Four important themes emerged from the analysis: the students had an overall positive attitude toward active learning; active learning was perceived to enhance their ability and efficiency in studying; active learning was perceived to improve the learning environment; and, active learning promoted their thinking about their learning and thus helped them to better understand their individual learning style. She also uncovered a few negatives that could easily be converted using the right interventions. She concludes by writing, "The most important need to be addressed is the inability of some students to deal with change. Many of these students come to higher education with expectations of very passive classroom experiences and those expectations must be uncovered, probed and altered. For some students it may go as far as the necessity to reframe what learning is: learning is not about covering material or gathering facts, learning is about integrating and using information in a meaningful way."

Throughout my years in higher education, I have had conversations with many faculty who are anxious when it comes to the student rating process. Many have said that they fear giving a student the grade they earned for fear that the student will rate the instructor badly in retaliation. I usually point out that the grade is posted after the student rating period is closed yet some have said that they think the student has a feeling about receiving a bad grade and so they give the faculty a lower rating. This sounded irrational to me although I am not disregarding anyone's feelings. There is a lot of stress that comes with teaching and students typically talk about the "grade you are giving me" rather than the grade they earned. So I was happy to discover a new study that brings some research to the topic. Tripp, Jiang, Olson, and Graso found that a student's perception that fairness is being used in the course reduces the chance of "evaluation retaliation." “We’ve long known there’s an association between expected students’ course grades and how they evaluate teachers,” lead author Thomas Tripp, associate dean of business at Washington State University at Vancouver, said in a statement. “Faculty may not feel a need to award artificially high grades, if they knew how students’ perceptions of justice might influence this relationship.”Read more here.

The BRCC community works hard at retaining students to completion (whether that be an academic credential, transfer to a bachelor's program or finding a job) and is not alone in searching for that "magic" solution. The truth is there isn't one intervention or approach that will serve all students. The solutions are as varied and diverse as our students. Looking at two research studies about retention and students enrolled in developmental education courses shows some surprising findings and useful interventions. In work done by Pamela S. Pruett and Beverly Absher, using data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, findings indicated that retention was significantly impacted by grade point average, engagement, type of remedial/developmental courses, time spent preparing for class, parents’ educational level, and students’ income level (measured indirectly by loans). They found that "Students who persist in college ask questions in class and contribute to class discussions, make class presentations, and work with other students on projects during class or outside the class (essentially engagement)." Gloria Crisp and Chryssa Delgado, in their study The Impact of Developmental Education on Community College Persistence and Vertical Transfer, demonstrate that developmental education may overall serve to decrease community college students’ odds of successfully transferring to a 4-year institution. Both studies offer suggestions for programming that could improve retention of students in developmental education courses.

We are regularly told that if we can just make our classes more exciting, our students would be motivated to learn. While I have found that to be true, I have also come to believe that using self-motivation and critical self-reflection is vital for any student to really become what I would call a super learner. This type of person wants to learn about new things because they understand that it enhances their quality of life. While they do want to get a great job (don't we all?) they know that hard work pays off and that learning for the sake of being a better informed person can be motivation enough. As I was going through my bookmark list, I found an article from 2013 that validates my observations. “Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation”, is a paper that was published based on research by David S. Yeager, Marlone D. Henderson, Sidney D’Mello, David Paunesku, Gregory M. Walton, Brian J. Spitzer, and Angela Lee Duckworth. They write, “Many important learning tasks feel uninteresting and tedious to learners. This research proposed that promoting a pro-social, self-transcendent purpose could improve academic self-regulation on such tasks. Results showed that a self-transcendent purpose for learning increased the tendency to attempt to deeply learn from the tedious academic task.” Because their research was very extensive and actually included four studies, I strongly encourage you dive into the article here.

Sarah Jones, a doctoral student at Michigan State, reminds us in her insightful post that giving more low-stakes assessments has a multitude of benefits for our students. She writes that providing your student with low-stakes testing will "produce large improvements in student final exam scores, help narrow the grade gap between poorly prepped and highly prepped first year college student, and might even result in more positive course reviews." She cites research by Scott Freeman, David Haak, and Mary Pat Wenderoth (Published in the Life Sciences Education edition of The American Society of Cell Biology) who wrote "We found no evidence that points from active-learning exercises inflate grades or reduce the impact of exams on final grades. When we controlled for variation in student ability, failure rates were lower in a moderately structured course design and were dramatically lower in a highly structured course design. This result supports the hypothesis that active-learning exercises can make students more skilled learners and help bridge the gap between poorly prepared students and their better-prepared peers." Some may be worried that their already heavy workload will be further burdened by more assessment. But the use of Canvas can actually reduce the amount of grading you have to do if you set up the quiz or analysis using the LMS. You can also use peer review, a great active learning tool that enhances learning for all students.

Does it seem like every other conversation about higher education begins with the words retention or persistence? Are there differences between students who attend community college versus a four year institution? Do we have definitive results that can be applied in every situation? We know that one of the many problems posed by the questions surrounding retention and persistence are the myriad of factors that are at play. In the latest addition of The Review of Higher Education (Spring 2017, V40, N3), Deryl K. Hatch and Crystal E. Garcia report on their research about these topics. In "Academic Advising and the Persistence Intentions of Community College Students in their First Weeks in College," the authors point out that there has been very little work that connects the factors that lead to dropping out and the student's initial goal. They acknowledge that academic advising centers and training for faculty advisors are two practices that could contribute to improving retention. The main results they report from the research include: 1) the relationship between engagement and persistence intentions heavily depends on individual goals, 2) different kinds of advising may have different effects for different students, and 3) the role of academic and social support networks matter in the near term and likely in the long term. Continue reading here.

When Alice E. Marwick, an assistant professor of media studies at Fordham University, assigned her social-media class to create a post on BuzzFeed, the instructions were simple: Go viral. Several students nailed the assignment, collecting more than 50,000 hits on their listicles and quizzes — BuzzFeed’s bread-and-butter articles. One student devised a quiz on She’s the Man, a quirky romantic comedy from 2006, that surpassed 250,000 page views in mere days, surprising the student and leaving her professor and classmates in awe. Ms. Marwick is one of several professors using BuzzFeed’s free publishing platform in its community section for class assignments. The section is open to anybody who wants to create a post, and instructors are using it to teach a variety of subjects, including marketing, creative writing, human development, and even the work of the ancient Roman poet Ovid. Continue reading here.

Take a look at Antonio Tooley's post if you are asking your students to do a research paper. He notes, "Writing a research paper does not actually take long at all. Your students can do a 10-page paper in one day if they really knuckle down and get going. The most annoying things about this academic assignment are at the beginning and the end of the process: the research and the bibliography. Your students will seldom find all the information they need in one database. When they do have enough information, they then have to wade through hundreds of pages of obfuscating language that academics love to use to get a couple of pages of useful material. Once they have the ample resource materials to back their arguments, students then need to “bag it and tag it” in preparation for the citations and references." Read more here.

When failing lessons need to be abandoned, it's time to implement a sponge. Madeline Hunter originated the term sponge activities to describe "learning activities that soak up precious time that would otherwise be lost." The best sponges are academically rich and provoke laughter. Nicholas Ferroni says that laughter activates dopamine and the learning centers of the brain.So give your students a dopamine snack when they finish the test earlier than expected or when the Wi-Fi goes out. Download the list of sponge learning experiences.