Re: [Phys-l] Active Learning forums?

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

>
I will attempt to give a definition of active learning.  It is learning
where the students are engaged in doing the learning themselves.  Generally
it involves kinesthetic learning (physical motion that causes learning),
minds on learning (things the students must solve or design) and Socratic
dialog.  Virtually of the PER curricula do this.

Passive learning would be a conventional lecture with no interaction, or
reading a book about a subject.  Students can turn passive situations into
active ones by asking themselves questions and interacting with the
situation.  In general they don't do this.  At least with a book the student
can use reference material to ferret out meanings, but during the heat of a
lecture this is usually not possible.

Active reading and active note taking/listening are possible, but rare.  An
example of active not taking is processing what is being said and then
thinking about whether you have already heard it.  What does it mean?  Write
down all new things and organize the notes as you go along.  An outline form
works very well by starting closer to the margin when you hear a brand new
topic.  This works very well for history lectures.  However in physics, what
the lecturer says and what the student perceives are often widely divergent,
so even active note taking may not be possible.  The student is usually not
aware that they are not just on a different page from the lecturer, but in a
different world.

Now active lectures are possible.  Eric Mazur's "Peer Instruction" is the
first example that comes to mind.  The second are the "Interactive Lecture
Demonstrations" by Sokoloff and Thornton.

The idea of active reading and listening is certainly not foreign to us, but
it is foreign to most students.  Even grad students do not always do it.
This is why the active lecture is valuable.  It forces the students to
practice active strategies by asking questions that they must all answer.
Just telling students how to do active strategies does not work because
telling them is passive and does not involve them in practicing an active
strategy.  The usual asking one student is only active for that one student,
but is passive for the other 99%.  But asking a voting question requires all
students to respond, and is automatically active.

As such Active Learning is probably the same as Hake's Interactive
Engagement.  But this is not by itself sufficient to ensure good learning.
If the questions are not properly prepared, or the sequencing is not right
then the learning will be suboptimal and may descend to low level typical of
passive learning.  The questions have to be ones which involve analysis
using concepts, and not just factual questions.

So Active Learning by itself is not sufficient.  It needs to be research
based for effectiveness.  And of course, the research has to be applicable
to the given student body.  This means it needs to be adjustable to the
current thinking level of the students.  A handful of outstanding teachers
have sometimes hit upon active strategies that work, but usually it has not
been bottled for the rest of us to use.  The Modeling program is based on
one such teacher, Malcolm Wells.  But even then further research adjusting
the method had been done, and infusions of other techniques have been done.
McDermott has successfully bottled good approaches by dint of sheer hard
work.  Most PER approaches rely on good teachers who doggedly read the
literature and try various applications of it until they have success.

While there has been some criticism of PER because it is seen as taking
responsibility away from the students, the opposite is really true.  The
student becomes responsible for their learning.  They must answer the
appropriate questions, and then try to reconcile what they thought with what
they saw or were told.  They are socked in the face with their
misconceptions.  The passive method allows them to hide the misconceptions
under a veneer of good sounding words, but when properly tested the veneer
cracks and the solid misconceptions show through.  Remember in "A Private
Universe" that the Harvard grads and profs could explain quite nicely, and
utter complete garbage.

Basically students are told to be active learners, but they are not forced
to practice it.  It takes about 160 hours or so of active learning for most
teachers to change their methods.  I presume it would take the same for
students to change the way they learn.  Only the top 5% or most brilliant
individuals are capable of spontaneously making radical changes in the way
they teach or learn.  They are the equivalent of the Nobel laureates of
education.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> bc, who wonders what active learning is.
>
> Scott Hill wrote:
>
> > Does anyone know of an active mailing list or web forum devoted
> > specifically to active learning techniques in physics?