Active Learning

Active learning creates a low bar to participation by encouraging every student to think and do, promotes community and connection between students, helps students gauge their own understanding, provides instructors with feedback about what students are learning.

Many of the larger scale studies on the effectiveness of active learning have been conducted in STEM disciplines, although the benefits of active learning extend to any field.  A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 research studies in STEM classes found that students in classes with active learning performed 6% better on exams than students in classes with traditional lecturing, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than in classes with active learning (Freeman et al, 2014).  Additionally, active learning has been shown to decrease the achievement gap for underrepresented minorities and first generation college students (Theobald et al, 2020).

ABL Connect provides more in-depth information about and examples of many of these activities.

In addition to these classroom-based strategies, instructors might take students out of the classroom; for example, students can visit museums or libraries, engage in field research, or work with the local community.