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Designing Active Learning Environments
equation). We believe that failing to teach technical reading skills to students is doing them a profound disservice and setting them up for rapid technical obsolescence.
In advocating for active learning, we are not suggesting that lecture be abandoned entirely. For lecture to be effective, however, students must be prepared to absorb the material presented. In A Time for Telling, Schwartz and Bransford (1998) described how students need relevant prior knowl- edge to benefit from lecture-based instruction. To learn from a lecture describing techniques for solving problems, for example, students must first become familiar with the problems of interest, perhaps by trying to solve problems and identifying the challenges they need to address. Hence, active learning and lecture can and should coexist in college teaching. The professor, acting as DJ (Figure 1), must care- fully mix these components to maximize student learning.
Students must complete the assigned reading (or assigned viewing) before class for active learning to succeed. A com- mon approach for motivating students to prepare for class is to start each day with a short quiz on the assigned material. Equally important is to teach students about active reading and watching. Technical material cannot be absorbed with the casual reading or viewing habits students use for Face- book (www.facebook.com) or Netflix (www.netflix.com). Students should be encouraged to take notes on the content and to work problems while reading or viewing, covering the answer (or pausing the video) to see if they can complete a problem on their own. They should also be encouraged to engage in frequent self-quizzing by recalling definitions and formulas as well as solving new problems (Brown et al., 2014, pp. 34-45). These techniques will help them retain the material for use in class and beyond.
Implementing Active Learning
This section describes our implementation of active learn- ing in engineering courses. The first paragraph describes the common structure of our active learning courses. Sub- sequent paragraphs discuss the variants in greater detail. All three of us begin with a short graded quiz to hold the students accountable for the required reading. We then re- view the reading quiz, providing an outline and overview of the topic for that day. We lecture in short 10- to 15-minute segments, reviewing fundamental or challenging aspects of the material. Students spend a majority of the time working collaboratively on problems in pairs or small groups while instructors (and TAs if available) circulate among the groups answering questions, providing feedback, and eavesdrop-
ping on students’ conversation to assess their misconcep- tions. Grading these in-class student exercises holds students accountable and keeps them focused. Weekly homework as- signments of more complicated problems build on the sim- ple in-class problems and challenge students to develop their knowledge and skills in novel contexts. This high level struc- ture is essentially unchanged from our prior descriptions of active-learning courses (Buck and Wage, 2005).
Our approach to the reading quizzes has evolved since 2005. The quiz may be on paper, online, or use automated response systems, generically known as “clickers,” depend- ing on class size and resources. The quiz may be open notes or closed book depending on the goals of the course. Open notes rewards note taking in active reading. Closed notes emphasizes mastery of fundamentals like complex number arithmetic. The quiz may include questions from the previ- ous class to encourage review of previous material.
We vary in our lecture segment delivery as well. In some classes, we repeat two or three cycles, interleaving the short lectures with problem-solving sessions. In other classes, we deliver a short lecture at the start and then spend the rest of the class period in student problem-solving, possibly inter- rupting the student discussions to address a common mis- conception. Another strategy is to start with a problem-solv- ing session directly after the reading quiz, break for a short lecture, and then return to problem solving. This approach exploits the deeper learning and longer recall activated by first struggling with a problem before learning the solution (Bjork and Bjork, 1992; Brown et al., 2014, pp. 67-101).
The in-class assignments also vary in format, scope, and as- sessment. For large sections in lecture halls poorly suited for group work, the students work multiple-choice problems in pairs, responding using clickers. Large-section problem- solving sessions may also include peer instruction through discussion, such as the Think-Pair-Share exercise cited above. In rooms configured for group work (Figure 4), stu- dents work short pencil and paper exercises in groups of three to four. When sufficient space is available, groups work on the board, facilitating discussion with peers and feedback from the instructor.
Our assessment strategies for the in-class problems try to balance low-stakes formative feedback for the students with sufficient group accountability to keep students engaged. In some classes, we grade the in-class problems on a tertiary scale of check/check plus/check minus. Other classes en- courage group accountability by requiring all of the mem-
16 | Acoustics Today | Summer 2016