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understand everything perfectly. Instructors often don't re- alize this was an illusion until they grade the midterms and sometimes not even then. If most of the exam questions are taken from the homework, students will be able to answer them by rote memorization. However, many students will lack the understanding to apply the concepts correctly in new contexts.
Why Does Active Learning Work Better Than Lecture?
Active learning seeks to minimize the illusion of knowing and spark questions when there are instructors available to answer. Guided by research, active learning also acknowl- edges that students’ prior knowledge affects their ability to learn and tries to bring misconceptions to the fore to correct them. In the analysis leading to the development of the FCI, Halloun and Hestenes (1985) concluded that conventional lecture courses do not force students to confront their mis- conceptions. This conclusion motivated significant research in physics education and the development of active methods of instruction, including Mazur (1997). These active meth- ods are consistent with the principles summarized in How Learning Works and Make It Stick.
The authors of this article teach signal processing and linear systems theory courses. Students in these courses encounter fundamental acoustical concepts like impulse response, fre- quency response, filtering, and Fourier analysis for the first time. Examples drawn from music, speech processing, psy- choacoustics, and bioacoustics make the mathematics come alive for students. For instance, one of the authors begins the semester by drawing a block diagram of an MP3 encoding system and then identifies which chapters in the textbook address each block. These courses can open doors to a life in acoustics research for students as similar courses did for the authors. We believe that the pedagogical lessons learned teaching these courses transfer naturally to other acoustics courses.
In the remainder of this article, we describe a variety of active learning techniques that are supported by research, and we illustrate these techniques using examples from our own courses. We hope the rest of the article will motivate the reader to try some of these techniques. The final section provides ideas and a list of resources for getting started.
Elements of Active Learning
Although a variety of definitions for active learning exist, we choose to define the term broadly for the purposes of
this article. Active learning, as the name implies, refers to classroom activities in which students are engaged in the learning process (Prince, 2004). This is in contrast to the traditional lecture, where it is assumed that students are lis- tening passively to material and that engagement does not move beyond copying notes. Active learning brings engage- ment with the material into the classroom, where instruc- tors can provide immediate feedback rather than relegat- ing hands-on practice to homework that is often completed alone. Collaborative learning is a subset of active learning, requiring students to work together to understand concepts, solve problems, and master material. Active-learning imple- mentations often vary across disciplines. Common forms of active learning in STEM courses include group problem solving, peer instruction, conceptual discussions, and labo- ratory explorations. Many active-learning techniques can be implemented in such a way that students first engage in- dividually with the material and then engage with peers to discuss and defend their conclusions. A common approach is the Think-Pair-Share technique (Lyman, 1981; Johnson et al., 1998; Barkley et al., 2005) in which students first work on a problem or question alone, then join with a peer to dis- cuss responses, and finally share collective responses with a larger group or the full class.
Making room for active learning in class requires pushing some traditional lecture out of the classroom. Moving lec- ture outside the class to allow time for active learning has motivated the now popular “flipped classroom” model. Al- though discussion of the flipped classroom often focuses on the means of delivering content that is flipped out of sched- uled class meetings, the major pedagogical opportunity is the new activities that are flipped in to the class. That said, the displaced lecture content must appear in some form, and it can be delivered in a variety of ways. An increasingly pop- ular approach to content delivery is via online videos. Vid- eos allow students to absorb material at their own pace and to rewatch content several times if needed. They can also sat- isfy students’ unquenchable thirst for examples. Videos are not the only option for content delivery, however. Lecture may also be flipped out of the classroom via more traditional delivery, reading the textbook. Learning new technical ma- terial by reading is an essential skill for a successful career. Technical fields progress rapidly, and even highly prepared students will need to learn new material within a few years of graduation. The fundamental medium of exchange for ad- vanced technical ideas is still the written word (and written
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