Active learning is what we call a very effective approach to instruction that usually involves students engaging themselves with the course material actively through a variety of methods. These methods include discussions, problem-solving, role plays, case studies, and many more. The purpose of this learning approach is to place a greater degree of responsibility on the learner than it can even be placed through a passive approach like lectures. But, do keep one thing in mind is that the instructor guidance is still quite crucial in the learning classroom.
Nowadays Free Online Courses with Certificate of Completion and MOOCs from top universities and leading organizations allow people to meet with and learn from others all over the world, all from the comfort of their homes this is also one of the examples of Active Learning.
- What are the Example/Technique of Active Learning
- Why is Active Learning Important
- Benefits of Active Learning
- Conclusion
What are the Example/Technique of Active Learning
There are a variety of learning activities or examples that can keep students as engaging as they can be from a couple of minutes to whole class sessions to taking place over multiple class sessions. So below we are going to talk about some of the best active learning techniques that one can apply.
Think Pair Share
First students are given a question and then asked to do brainstorming on it and then they have to share their thoughts with another designated student.
Role-Playing
Here each student is given a role of a person that is affected by an Earth science issue. It could be anything from a Volcano to a polluted lake, issues in human life to global issues, and then share their perspective about it.
Peer Review
This is another active learning technique that is quite helpful. Here students are asked to write something on a given topic and then other students are going to review and give comments about what is being written.
Discussion
Active learning also involves different group discussions where students are given a topic and then everyone gets to say something about it.
Problem Solving Using Real Data
Here students are given access to some real data for exploring scientific questions and their solutions.
Thus these and many other techniques are used in this learning like just in time teaching, discovering plate boundaries, game-based learning, etc.
Why is Active Learning Important
Learning has its own significance and here is how and why.
Very few of the educational interventions are able to match the power of learning whenever it comes to improving student academic outcomes. Now, why is that so? Well, researchers have found out that the basis of higher student achievement and engagement highly depends on the instructional methods which involve learning techniques. Those students who are not employing learning strategies lack the skills to become better or even outperform peers who have such skills.
Even though educators have been encouraged to a great extent to incorporate learning strategies into their teaching. And this has been going on for decades now, yet little has changed in how the students are being taught in higher education. Both the traditional face-to-face and online instructions tend to be characterized by information transmission models where they are mostly relying on passive lecturing and textbook reading. And that is how this instructional approach gives out a little opportunity for students to engage in the types of active processing which is required to create enduring and transferable knowledge.
So you see this is why this learning has to become a prominent part of today’s educational system.
Benefits of Active Learning
Learning comes with a lot of benefits, some of which are mentioned below.
- It helps to develop collaborative skills.
- It enables students to take a risk by presenting different theories relevant to their topic.
- When students know that they are the ones to present something in front of the class, they would want some time to prepare for the topic first.
- It increases the engagement of students with teachers and other students as well.
- It forces students to think out of the box.
- It makes the tech look more powerful as they get to use the tools and systems by themselves.
- According to Dale’s Cone of Experience , it has been found out that students remember 10% of what they read. 20% of what they hear but 90% of what they do on their own. And learning is all about trying to learn things on your own. So, it increases retention.
Conclusion
So by reading this article you can easily understand that active learning has a lot of benefits and it can for sure help educational systems to produce better students.
