When Active Learning Goes Right (And Wrong) | How Learning Works

Active learning. What does it actually mean? And how can we leverage active learning to make teaching more effective? And finally, what kinds of "active learning" seem active but are actually a waste of time?

This video addresses each of these questions and provides a roadmap for you to create effective active learning experiences.

00:00 Introduction
00:43 Active learning definition
02:13 Challenge 1: Lots of forms of active learning
02:44 Challenge 2: A lot of decision-making
03:40 Breaking down good active learning
03:56 Organizing knowledge
04:58 Recall and Application
06:06 Making Predictions (an aside - pulling stuff out of head is good)
07:18 Practice
07:49 Bad active learning; word search example
08:54 Good active learning
09:14 Geology example

12:19 Comment. Commenting's good.

Meta-analyses can be tricky to do right and even trickier to interpret, but this one is solid. It also dovetails with a lot of other research (look up: the testing effect, the generation effect, research on free recall, etc.).

It’s a classic. I didn’t mention the fact that people misjudged how much they would remember with each technique (research participants thought they would remember more through re-study, not recall). This is also not just an isolated study. Lots and lots of research replicates this free recall effect and similar effects, like the generation effect, that illustrate this aspect of active learning.

If you read the study, there’s an additional group I didn’t mention - a concept map group. The concept map group did about as poorly as the re-study group, but I mentioned concept maps as a potential active learning technique. What's up with that? I'll do a video on concept maps at some point, but the short answer is that when you make the concept map while the study materials are in front of you, it's only marginally helpful. When you leverage free recall and make a concept map without the study materials with you, it's a lot more powerful.

Now, what extra boost the concept map buys you in addition to the straight-up free recall (no organizational schema at all) is an open question. But at the moment, I think it buys you something.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty, I actually think Michelene Chi’s distinction between “active”, “constructive”, and “interactive” is a helpful way of thinking about things.

Sometimes we have to use the terms that people are using - and lots of people use the term "active learning," even though people don't necessarily mean the same thing by it. It's a poorly defined term, which is why I wanted to talk about what "good" active learning looks like.

[animanya]

For me the most interesting learning experience was studying physics through “magic”. That’s why I think videos like “what if earth was donut-shaped” are the best. You aren’t just told that gravity is mg or whatever, it makes you think of consequences, of all different variations. It’s the opposite of “perfect spheres in a vacuum” that doesn’t actually behave how we see it. It’s effing galaxy brain 🌌 🧠

[leroysalih]

As a high school teacher looking to improve pupil performance, the idea I found most surprising is how poorly our 1 hour, single objective lessons fit the ideas that you've outlined here. I'm now planning on designing lessons differently, in blocks, where each each lesson is split in to 2-3 sessions allowing students to observe and organize new concepts, compare and contrast concepts previously introduced and finally, evaluate and predict concepts that were introduced a few lessons ago.

I used to think that getting pupils to take their own notes and convert into mind maps was a good form of active learning, as it required students to think about converting large amounts of text in to smaller, shaper descriptions. However, this is only 1 of the 3 requirements you have outlined, and so mindmaps need to be used as part of a wider learning experience.

Really enjoying your channel, your content is really making me think about how I structure and teach my lessons.

Subscribed & liked.

[markwalker]

What stood out to me most was the fact of how making predictions improves the learning. When I was young, whenever a teacher asked what we thought might happen if..., I just thought it was a useless introduction to the real learning, you know, don't tell me what you're GOING to say, just SAY it!!! Now I know the wisdom of it.

For me, and this may not be shared by many people, I really needed to know the why of things in active learning, basically the metacognition of it, even long before I knew the term. To me so much of my childhood and life in school was just doing what I was told, following orders. It reminds me of Planet of the Apes where the apes were told "DO!" That's what I felt like much of the time. I didn't know why I was doing what I was told to do. It would have helped me if, from time to time, I was told the why. This is why we're organizing the material this way. This is why we're comparing and contrasting these items. This is why we're taking a test on this (not just for a grade or to see whether you're smart or stupid). I don't think I would have felt like I did for much of the time, just a sheep or cow being herded through the stalls to the invariable slaughter house of adulthood.

[drachenhexer]

What surprised me, was how you explained, that asking the question before giving the answer helps with learning, because that's exactly what happened to me a week ago.
Our teacher asked, why objects expand when heated up and I gave my answer, which was wrong but when I got the actual answer I was even more excited to write it down and remember it. Today I could even answer a question related to it to a friend, so that felt like a great learning experience.

[Atlas-dsyv]

As a physics teacher who have received extensive trainings about pedagogy, I can say that active learning is misunderstood sometimes. We are mainly encouraged to focus on "activities and games". However, I think effective active learning is more about cognitive processes and not physical ones.
Thank you for this great video.

[MWinston]

Surprise: Thinking back on effective classes how much they relied on students generating hypotheses before the real information was revealed to them
Bad Experience: Group activities in which the solution can be gained by means other than deep understanding of the topic, or projects for which much of the grading was about something other than understanding of the topic (like aesthetics)

[gwineafowl]

I am still relatively new to the science of learning and have only been sifting through videos from you and Justin Sung and applying free recall to remember and understand the principles you two teach. The newest thing I learned from this video might have seemed obvious to others, but the example with the two types of lectures (info dump vs. combined with student-instructor interactions) made passive vs. active learning make sense, or at the very least stick to my brain more significantly (I'm sure I have heard about passive learning somewhere, but now I can explain it a little more confidently). This set a solid foundation for understanding the rest of the video as well as connect it to your other recent video about how we can use free recall to learn more from Youtube videos. Think about it: me watching this video would have been passive learning if it weren't for me writing this comment.

[ngoclongvu]

I have subscribed to your channel, Dr Benjamin. The thing that surprised me the most is to learn about active learning in a systematic way. For the first time I've known how passive and active learning are so different. Also this video works as a reminder. I should be more active in my learning and tell others to do the same.

[DarrenMcStravick]

For me, the thing that I was most fascinated by was what you described to be the two ways students have to reason in the 4th class -- which fit nicely into my background knowledge of analytic philosophy:

Jonanthan Schaffer talks about how most, if not all things take a three-part structure of basis, link, result (you can learn more in his lecture on YouTube, "Beyond Fundamentality"). What students seem to be learning when they're reasoning "both ways" is what's called a determination relation (reasoning from geological forces to the resulting rock formations) and an explanation relation (reasoning from the rocks to what forces are necessary preconditions for them existing).

Both determination and explanation relations go into defining something comprehensively, so when students understand each component well, they'll understand the learning material exceptionally well. This is because they're literally acquiring (in a high-quality manner) all the essential semantic information about what a given thing actually is.

[kevinkelly]

1 Nothing surprising because I have watched videos and read books on active learning for years. Did help me organise the different types better in my head, though.

2 My geography teacher was the most boring human being that ever existed. I'll put folding money on that outcome. There was only one textbook in the room and he held it. He would write the chapter on the board and we had to write it into our jotters. To stay awake I learned to connect my eyes directly to the hand holding the pencil so that I could spend the time planning to build a submarine. No idea how I scraped pass in Geography O level

[eV]

I realized you applied the three types of active learning in your video on how to study for finals.

[frede]

What surprised me is that you pointed to the interaction between the lecturer and the student as an example of active learning because it's something I've been doing for a long time, and I didn't know it was a form of active learning.

A set of good experiences I've had with active learning is my academic success in highschool. I think a good amount of my understanding has come from asking questions in class and prying the teachers for answers.

[chaudiep]

From this video i've learnt that Organized structures requires making connections, relationships among ideas/info we learn; Recall and apply requires having comparison among ideas. So making connections, comparisons is higher level of learning in Bloom's taxonomy. I used to learn SQL- a query language for data by learning code casually along with tutorials, that's why i forgot it quickly and had to study once again, now i thought I should apply right learning method to learn it and store it in long-term memory.

[stzurel]

I was surprised by the three categories. In my mind, I have been separating it into the organization (or more like encoding) and retrieval. I was categorizing “practice” as a sub-category under retrieval. I’d be interested to learn a bit more about the distinction.

[mateomartinez]

The organization part it's really key for me because that's the missing piece i was lacking to grasp. A bad experience with active learning was trying to understand a subject i didn't understand very well, why i didn't understand very well that subject, easy because i didn't understand the importance of the subject in the big picture, this happen to me in programming. In that time i didn't understand the specific of the subject and that make more confused. A good experience with active learning was when i was learning math, i organized the subject in that time, then i focus in learn the basic from certain problems, after that i ended being better a math just because i organized the theme and understand the basics from the problem.

[Aritul]

What I learnt from this video was that a good active learning strategy requires you to

organize knowledge

recall and apply knowledge

practice what you've learnt



I can't think of a specific bad experience that I have had, but I will say that I was the type to re-read, highlight, and jot down notes and never review either the stuff I highlighted or the notes that I took.

[hulkmahmut]

What surprised me was the bird part, but not in a way like it came up from nowhere or I didn't know this. More like, "Wow, this is what I've been waiting for." I'm 100% sure that organizing stuff is going to help me because I always try to learn a bunch of information about one topic and don't even know if they are related or not.

A bad active experience of mine is, as I mentioned before, I am trying to get a bunch of stuff that is not organized. And I don't tend to do recall activities.
And for a good active learning experience, I'd say it just happened now while watching your video. I tried to predict the rock example for students, and yeah, I was wrong, but it has made me more focused on your answer about the rocks.

[elardenbergsousa]

For me the hardest part to implement is recall because I think that I got used to rely too much on intuition and also think that returning to one subject is like redoing the work. Sure those are tricks from the brain, but I think I can come up with something from this video that will really help me learning, by trying to structurize my subject, recall it and apply it.

[HaseebAhmad-dtko]

I was suprised to find out that word search is not effective. In my head, it was this persona that every learning that requires intense cognitive load is better.

[lapanthanim]

Very helpful video! The thing that jumped out at me most was that it's okay to form some hierarchical mental organizational structures (or at least partially so). I must have been unconsciously overcorrecting after hearing Justin Sung say that when building mental models, you want to have lateral connections in there from the start and not add them later. I realize now upon reflection that even his example diagrams had a bit of hierarchy scattered within them since sometimes information just has to be structured that way. Thanks for helping me realize I was being too rigid there! I'm really glad I found both of your channels in the last couple of days.