Page 14 - 2016Summer

John R. Buck
Postal:
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 285 Old Westport Road Dartmouth, Massachusetts 02747-2300 USA
Email:
johnbuck@ieee.org
Kathleen E. Wage
Postal:
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department George Mason University 4400 University Drive Fairfax, Virginia 22030 USA
Email:
k.e.wage@ieee.org
Jill K. Nelson
Postal:
Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department George Mason University 4400 University Drive Fairfax, Virginia 22030 USA
Email:
jnelson@gmu.edu
Designing Active Learning Environments
Switching from lecture to active learning is an act of courage, but the growing consensus of research on the benefits of active learning is difficult to ignore.
"...teachers possess the power to create conditions that can help students learn a great deal -- or keep them from learning much at all. Teaching is the intentional act of creating those conditions..." - Parker Palmer (1998)
Introduction
What conditions help students learn? How do we design a course environment to foster those conditions? How can we tell if students are learning what we teach? The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and flipped classrooms has reinvigorated discussion of these questions in higher education. At the same time, research by Kuhl and her colleagues (2003, 2010) demonstrates that even infants learn better from engagement with a live person than they do from watching re- cordings. Kuhl et al.’s research resonated with our own experience that university students also learn better from interactive engagement than from passive viewing of lectures. Recent neuroscience and education research on learning and memory confirms the benefits of active learning, which includes techniques such as col- laborative in-class problem solving (Ambrose et al., 2010; Brown et al., 2014). This article highlights research on active learning and describes our implementation of it in engineering courses.
DJ Prof versus Popstar Prof
Blending active learning with some lecture and external resources such as text- books and videos creates the conditions needed for a student-centered learning environment. In a musical analogy, the professor in a student-centered course becomes the DJ, mixing together multiple modes of instruction for the students’ benefit (Figure 1). In contrast, the professor in a traditional lecture course is the soloist or pop star, delivering content with minimal feedback from students. Al- though many faculty worry that changing from lecture to student-centered learn- ing means that they will not have time to cover as much material, the data indicate that students master more material despite the professor covering less. Switching from lecture to active learning is an act of courage, but the growing consensus of research on the benefits of active learning is difficult to ignore.
Research on Learning
Two recent books provide guidance on creating effective conditions for student learning in university-level courses. How Learning Works (Ambrose et al., 2010) presents seven principles for teaching derived from the literature on psychology, anthropology, and organizational behavior. Ambrose et al.’s first principle is “Stu- dents’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.” The book’s discussion of this principle (p.4) highlights the importance of addressing students’ prior misconcep- tions to help them learn new material. Simply informing students of their miscon-
12 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2016 | volume 12, issue 2 ©2016 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved.