Decision, Decisions, Decisions… How Active Learning is Implemented Matters!

Active learning has been recommended as a more effective way to teach when compared to traditional lecturing, yet active learning can be implemented in many different ways. One common approach in active learning is to ask students to share out their thoughts either with other students or in front of the whole class.

These social interactions can be fruitful for hearing different perspectives and building classroom community, but they also can present challenges because they create a larger number of opportunities for a student to feel judged based on their answers. This worry of being judged, or fear of negative evaluation, has been shown to be a problem in active learning, particularly for students with anxiety.

Implementation of Active Learning

In two interview studies, one with students from a research institution and a second with community college students, students reported that how active learning is implemented matters. Answering a question that is timed based on accuracy while working with students they don’t know elevated students’ fear of negative evaluation and their levels of anxiety. However, it’s not that active learning alone increased their anxiety because those same students talked about active learning decreasing their anxiety when they could check their understanding of a topic when working with groupmates that they know.

Small Decisions Make a Difference

When instructors choose to teach in an active learning way, they are making hundreds of small decisions, some of which may elevate student anxiety, while others may decrease it. The only classroom decision that we found always heightened anxiety: requiring students to share in front of the class. Even though random call has been recommended as a way to ensure that there are no inequities in student participation in response to instructor questions, equal participation does not mean that students equally benefit from the experience. For some students with anxiety, requiring them to share out in front of the whole class seemed to cause them to not be able to think clearly through the problem, which detracted from their learning! However, there are other ways to elicit student participation that are less anxiety-inducing and potentially more equitable as far as an experience, so instructors can create less anxiety-inducing active learning courses that are just as effective for student learning without forcing students to share in front of the class.

So next time you decide to teach in an active learning way, remember that you are making countless little decisions that can impact students… for better or worse.

---

Post-Author:
Sara Brownell is an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University where she explores how to create more inclusive undergraduate biology learning environments.