First, I’ll discuss a semi-recent (2014) meta-analysis (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on active learning (opens in a new window) and its follow-up meta-analysis (2020) by the same research group (published in PNAS as well; opens in a new window). The particular focus on those two studies was prompted by a recent article published in the Chronicles of Higher Education by Beckie Supiano in June of this year (2022, opens in a new window).
I’m a big believer in the fact that a picture is worth a thousand words. Thus, I’ll spare you the details of the studies and cut to the chase. After all, those two PNAS papers are open access and can be perused by anybody, anytime. For this first study (PNAS 2014) we will be mainly focusing on “(i) scores on identical or formally equivalent examinations, concept inventories, or other assessments; or (ii) failure rates, usually measured as the percentage of students receiving a D or F grade or withdrawing from the course in question (DFW rate).“
What are we looking at here, well, the left-hand-side figure shows many more studies with a decrease rather than an increase in failure rate when active learning is used (the blue bars). Similarly, the right-hand-side figure shows a shift in the distribution of the percentage of students failing class from a typical lecture (red) to an active (blue) classroom.
What does this mean?! Students were performing half a standard deviation better in the active learning classroom (weighted standardized mean difference of 0.47, Z = 9.781, P << 0.001). Furthermore, students in classic lecture classrooms were 1.5 times more likely to fail the course than in active learning classrooms (equivalent to the odds ratio of 1.95, Z = 10.4, P << 0.001). This is the same as an increase in the failure rate by 55%. I don’t know for you, but those numbers don’t strike me as trivial or easily ignorable. Let’s look at another set of figures to drive the point further, with more details.
Okay, let’s focus on the right-hand side this time as we are looking at “% decrease in failure rate,” a familiar concept (I’ll leave out the effect sizes, the left-hand-side of the figure, as it’s a little bit more complex to interpret and beyond the scope of this blog post). The overall result, at the bottom in black, is broken down by STEM discipline as dots with the sample sizes as labels (i.e., the number of studies) and the 95% confidence interval as the bars. We can see that the overall 10% decrease in failure rate can be as high as 15-18% in Biology (that’s my jam right there). Also, note that only in the case of a minuscule sample size for Geology do we see a non-significant result (aka the 95%CI crossing 0).
To conclude with this study, I want to mention one caveat that the author do not shy away from: a 0.47 Standard Deviation change represents a 0.3 increase on a student’s final grade. So we’re looking at a change from B- to B or B to B+ on class medians. One may read this and conclude, so that’s it, that’s all we gain? Why do we bother?? Well, there is more to it than just the course grade and studies don’t always capture everything. What about the mindset change we set students on? Active learning classroom promote ownership of one’s learning allow students to grow from semester to semester. Furthermore, is the objective really to increase grades or reduce the failure rate? Because the latter allows students to save tuition dollars by avoiding having to pay again for a class since they don’t fail it anymore. The key here is to look at the big picture and distance ourselves from grade points to focus on by-in, representation, and resilience in our courses.
Let’s keep images as our main conveyer of information here when looking at the second study (PNAS 2020). In this case we are looking at the standardized achievement gap between students from Minoritized Groups in STEM (MGS) and non-MGS students.
Once again, here, we find that the exam score gap, on the left, or the gap in percent passing, on the right (between MGS and non-MGS students), diminishes in the active versus passive classroom. Note the higher 95% Confidence Intervals (95CIs) on the right; well, turns out that the intensity of the active learning modality creates interesting interactions … low active learning settings lead to a widening of the gap in percent passing compared to passive classrooms - the exam score gap still remains in favor of active learning regardless of the intensity though (see below). That’s wild, no?
Now, the real kicker is this: what is active learning and/or low/high-intensity active learning? The fascinating part here is that it’s anything but passive lecturing really. It goes from simply dynamic lecturing (see a previous blog post of mine, opens in a new window) to full-on group work in the classroom while students get first acquainted with the material at home (flipped classroom).
What I really like about this realization is that no matter what you believe in concerning active learning, there is a piece of it that you can introduce in your classroom with minimal effort and great rewards! It’s all about: deliberate practice and a culture of inclusion in the classroom. On the one hand, deliberate practice, we’re talking about scaffolding of assignments, immediate as well as repeated feedback, and repetition (offer your students a chance to redo assignments and or provide multiple assignments). On the other hand, we’re saying respecting students’ humanity as well as intelligence (trust me, they know you’re the boss, that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them while respecting their expertise, they’re the best placed to know what they think after all), conveying confidence in students’ capacity to meet high standards of achievement, and genuinely caring about students’ progress/lives/growth. Does this sound revolutionary? Not to me, it sounds pretty much like the basis of a relationship that allowed me to diminish my work in the classroom by empowering students and laser-focusing my feedback on what matters. The study’s authors refer to those six points (see bold terms above) as the heads-and-hearts hypothesis.
There is much more to say here but I want to keep this blog post short and sweet, to the point. We’ve established that equity principles and active learning teaching is best for improving our students’ experiences as well as performances (especially the minority gap). In the next post, we’ll explore what can equity and active learning look like in our classroom.