Active learning is more effective, but students don't think so (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Active learning is more effective, but students don't think so (2019)

arstechnica.com

16 pointsfanf221 comments

I bet for some of these students, the goal of those classes is not to learn, it's to get enough information to pass tests so the students can check a box off on a prerequisites list so they can get their piece of paper. A student can review a recording of a lecture a month later to cram for a test. I imagine an "active learning" session is more difficult to record and review down the road. I think you have to reckon with the disparity in motivation between the teacher and the student in this situation. I imagine many of the students there don't really care about physics. They want to receive their information in as passive a way as possible so they can zone out during lectures. I think the article touches on that but reaches the wrong conclusion, relating it to an incorrect perception of the efficacy of the lesson instead of relating it to the students simply not wanting to put in the effort for something they probably don't care about.

That's my take on it as a former college student, anyway.

Harsh reality, but so true. I wish the whole education system wasn't at this point

> I imagine many of the students there don't really care about physics.

This has been my experience, time and time again. If the student is interested in the subject matter, almost any educational method works tremendously well, because the failings are compensated for by the student.

If the student is just there to get past the class because of a requirement, it's quite hard for any method to work tremendously well. However, some methods (say small seminar vs large lecture) can be more conductive to triggering that interest "for its own sake".

But I well know I went through seminar-style classes of 15 or so students in subjects I didn't care about and didn't want to care about, and I performed as necessary to get through without repeating.

This study would seem to contradict that sentiment, unless you suggest that interest in specifically statics or fluids (the two subjects taught on the days studied) was narrowly triggered over an interest in mechanics in general.

> I imagine many of the students there don't really care about physics.

It might be, but AFAICS the study was conducted at Harvard and I believe students at prestige universities have much more will to study. If they chose physics, they are likely interested in it

The reality is no one speaks up or you get like two people who speak up the entire class when the professor engages with the class. Sure active learning is best, but it requires a level of attention, alertness, and engagement that most students aren’t interested in stepping up for. Very few even take advantage of office hours even while struggling in the class. Maybe its from being burned out, maybe its from being tired, maybe its from being shy, whatever it is, teachers can’t exactly fix it and make people want to be active in class. It takes two.

All true. There are things teachers can do that help, but nothing is a silver bullet. One thing that I seldom hear discussed is classroom design. Lecture halls (the clue is in the name!) with fixed seating are death to seminar / "active classroom" techniques. As a professor, I would never try those in that layout; as a student, I'd down-vote an awkward attempt, too.

Tuition would have to go way up if they nixed the lecture. That class sponges up probably 6-8 TA sections worth of students 3x a week. So to staff that like they do in the 1x weekly section with your TA (about 20ish students per instructor) you need to hire probably 10x as many instructors, a lot more for some classes even. Money needs to come from somewhere for that.

Indeed. Many things we know about learning and scholarship are rendered academic by the university system.

We need to give more credence to our subconscious abilities. People like their knowledge to be sheets of notes or flash cards they can rattle off because those are easy for our conscious minds to quantify. The subconscious mind is way stronger though, a basketball player can instantly calculate a shot that would take a few minutes to consciously calculate by hand.

We should view education more in this light, less memorizing a bunch of facts and more getting problem solving repetitions in with an expert to guide you through them. It would be insane if we taught basketball only on paper and then sent players out on the court, but we do that with a bunch of other subjects.

With proof or not, it's very hard to convince anyone of anything they don't want to believe.

It's generally not fun to acknowledge that you're wrong. When you're convinced something that you like is true it's even harder to accept an alternate viewpoint (even a valid one).

Most people can acknowledge that vegetables are good for them even if they don't eat them, for example. But it's much harder to get people to admit that the thing they love is provably false.

Also, not all proof is good. E.g. these date come from one physics class doing this experiment once. Are these good data? I’m not sure if this is an effective sample size as these estimates haven’t been performed afaik. What is the variance in the population? Who knows. Accepting some data just because its some data is just as bad as believing something on faith alone. It kind of is just that in fact.

Sample size was 149 students, difference in test results was 0.46σ with a P<0.001

This is an absurdly large effect for a social-science result, so I too would like to see this replicated. Leaving half a standard-deviation of results on the table would be an extreme failure of pedagogy.

In addition, the study mentions that a typical lecture for students was semi-interactive, so it would be nice to see the AL method compared with the existing one (rather than a completely passive control), presuming that the semi-interactive classes are more palatable to the students, it might be a good "sweet spot"

At the same time they limited it to a harvard calculus based physics class using the "regular instructors approach used for years" so one professor teaching calc based physics at harvard. Its making an assumption that this would work for every other academic setting and that there isn't some bias inherent with either the teacher, the coursework, or even the student body of harvard which is arguably more selective than a lot of other student bodies. Does this even hold water for other physics classes at harvard? I seem to remember from my own schooling quite a lot of variance between different professors exam scores on the same exact course in the same exact semester, something rectified with a huge curve at the end of the semester. In other words, maybe this professor is just a terrible lecturer. We don't have very strong evidence to say one way or another about the applicability of this study to the general population of students, I don't think.

Correction: Two professors teaching non-honors mechanics at Harvard. Authors' claim that using the non-honors course filtered out the "most well-prepared" students. The class appears to count as credit towards a physics degree and 1/3 of the class went on to pursue a physics degree.

Sure it's calculus-based, but non-calculus based mechanics is, IMO, educational malpractice at the collegiate level. You can do a qualitative approach to mechanics without calculus, but that ought not fill up an entire semester; a "survey of physics" class could take such an approach, but a purely mechanics class ought not.

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Also, the marginal student at Harvard is going to be quite similar to a student at any number of only-slightly-less selective schools. I could see an argument that this might not replicate at a large non-selective state school, but (assuming it replicates at Harvard), I'd assume it would replicate across a wide swath of selective schools.

> Also, not all proof is good

Yes and people are excellent at deciding which proof is good. Turns out the good proof is the proof that supports what I already think.

Well, bayesians are a little bit less biased perhaps

No, it's still really easy to ignore bayesians.

This makes a big assumption that you can properly capture all learning with a test. The lack of comfort students feel with the active learning approach should not be ignored.

> This makes a big assumption that you can properly capture all learning with a test.

It makes a much weaker assumption: that learning is sufficiently correlated with test results. Tests are definitely not perfect, particularly at the individual level, but as an aggregate they are pretty good.

Suppose you teach addition, multiplication, and division. One teaching approach spends all time teaching addition. The other teaching approach teaches all three topics. An exam is given only over addition, and the first teaching approach leads to better scores. It would be unwise to conclude from this that the second teaching approach should be discarded.

Just for clarity purposes, this is exactly the point of my original comment. The active learning approach may very well be doing a better job preparing students for the test. That's why we should be cautious about concluding students are too dumb to know they're learning more that way. There's more than one interpretation of the data.

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