Developing territory for active learning

Ibrahim, et al. found that active learning helped hundreds of students at their university in Oman get higher grades and reduced their risk of failing in Introductory Physics, Astronomy, and Quantum Mechanics. Hundreds of prior studies for thousands of other classrooms in these and many other subjects had found the same. Yet, this is a new territory.

Active learning is a broad term that describes alternatives to traditional lectures, particularly at the university level in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). The idea of active learning goes back decades. Dewey (1) wrote in 1933 “… it is part of the educator's responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.” This prescription is emphatic but not overly specific, and the last 30 years have seen a slow development of detailed procedures and techniques that lead in practical ways toward this ideal in large university classes. The development of techniques has been closely intertwined with evidence of their effects on students.

The accumulation of evidence reached a critical stage with the publication in 2014 of an analysis by Freeman et al. (2) who with techniques of meta-analysis (3) summarized 225 research studies showing strong positive student effects due to active learning across many branches of STEM. The authors hovered on the edge of accusing any instructor not striving to incorporate active techniques into their coursework of educational malpractice, but despite the comprehensive nature of their study, it left areas of uncertainty. One was that the hundreds of studies focused overwhelmingly on high-income countries and mainly on the United States. The focus on the United States is illustrated by the fact that 27 of the studies were PhD or Master’s theses from US universities. By contrast, for low- and middle-income countries, the studies included one each from India, Indonesia, and Thailand and three from Turkey; the cumulative number of students in these five studies was less than 700, and only one of the studies ended with statistically significant results (4–8). Of the thousands of papers citing Freeman et al. (2), I found only one study of substantial size from outside the high-income countries (9).

Ibrahim, Sulaiman, and Ali (10) carry out their careful examination of active learning in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) and are conscious of the stakes. People less than 30 years old are 55% of the population of the MENA region. Out of a population of over 450 million, 170 million lived in extreme poverty in 2018 (11), and youth unemployment has hovered around 25% for decades (12). The authors are not shy about their belief in the power of education to empower youth and provide them opportunity and hope and the prospect of prosperity. On the other hand, they are harshly critical of available university education in the sciences: “Outdated and disengaging science education, which teaches science as a body of facts, and assesses mainly on rote-memorization, does not only turn youth away from STEM disciplines … but also degrades the overall learning and skill-outcomes of the graduates. (10)”

The authors describe an investigation into teaching methods they conducted at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. The courses are taught in English, although this is not the native language of most of the students. The typical failure rate for foundation physics courses as traditionally taught had been 25%. The authors settled on a set of active learning strategies and implemented them in five courses: Physics I, II, and III, Astronomy I, and Quantum Mechanics. A set of instructors alternated between teaching eight sections of the courses with active methods and eleven sections in a traditional fashion over a period of 2 years, involving 2,145 students. Incoming student characteristics were uniform, and assessments were equivalent across all the sections of each course.

They had positive results in two linked yet distinct areas. Student scores went up on average by around five points or 9%. The probability of failing went down; students were more than 3.5 times as likely to fail in the traditional classes as in those taught with active methods. Most, although not all, comparisons between traditional and active courses passed tests of statistical significance. In the traditional classes, a small tail of students obtained a final course score of 35% or less. In the active learning sections, this tail was essentially eliminated. The students in the active learning sections enjoyed the courses more and ended with a more positive view of the subjects.

The authors conclude that the benefits of active learning are even greater in the MENA region than in the United States and other wealthy countries. The drop in failure rates they find are particularly large. And they accomplished these gains without any expensive purchases of equipment, without changing instructional facilities, and without needing technology more advanced than the students’ own cell phones.

Such findings matter because active learning is far from dominating instructional practice. The reality of undergraduate instruction in the sciences remains an expanse of nearly unbroken lecture. A 2018 study in the United States found that in more than half of 709 classes observed, lecture took up 80% or more of the time (13). Thus, even if instructors have heard of active learning techniques, few of them have taken steps to adopt them, and many may not be convinced that they should (14).

“Ibrahim et al. found that active learning helped hundreds of students at their university in Oman get higher grades, and reduced their risk of failing introductory physics, astronomy, and quantum mechanics.”

Those who resist active learning have cover for it. One review describes active learning as “an umbrella term that is not particularly useful in advancing research on learning” (15). The academic conversation about active learning mainly takes place in journals frequented by practitioners of Discipline-Based Education Research, publications such as Cell Biology Education, Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences rather than the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Many education research professionals remain skeptical the problem active learning addresses has been properly defined, let alone solved.

These objections have some force. Active learning appears to describe a technique, but really, it is defined by what it is not. It stands in opposition to an experience consisting of unbroken lecture where students interact minimally or not at all with the instructor and each other. The space of options outside the unbroken lecture is large. Possible ingredients include flipped classrooms (16), (17), peer instruction (18), (19), student presentations (20), cooperative learning teams (21), and learning assistants (22), (23). The class meeting time does not contain the totality of a student’s experience in a course. Students have reading, homework, recitation sections, and laboratories, and all of these contribute to how much they learn, and may be interacting with the classroom experiences. Furthermore, education is highly contextual. One should not assume that methods optimized in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach Organic Chemistry to premeds will be the best methods to teach Computer Science to Mathematics students in Buffalo, New York, let alone Physics in Oman.

A response to such objections is that even if active learning is an umbrella term, the materials developed for particular courses and disciplines are highly specific and tuned to potentially universal difficulties students encounter when learning specific subjects. The reformed courses in Oman started with materials developed by Physics Education Research groups in Minnesota and Colorado and then further refined to provide context-rich activities (24) that fit the Middle East.

Thus, evidence for active learning continues to grow. Evidence is growing that active learning narrows achievement gaps for students underrepresented in STEM (25). And with the work of Ibrahim, Sulaiman, and Ali, evidence is growing that one can move halfway across the globe from the United States, work in English with students for whom this is not the native tongue, choose and lightly modify a set of established active techniques, and measure student gains in test scores, persistence, and attitude that rival or exceed those in the contexts where the methods were born.