Danielle Clevenger, University of Wisconsin – What’s Wrong with Active Learning?

On this Student Spotlight: We’ve heard a lot about active learning, but what is it exactly?

Danielle Clevenger, Ph. D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison, examines this question.

Danielle (Dani) Clevenger is currently a Philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research spans a number of sub-disciplines in philosophy including philosophy of science, philosophy of cognitive science, and philosophy of education. She is strongly committed to producing impact-oriented research that can contribute to current dialogues about important social issues. She is also a Gullickson Scholar of Teaching and Learning and works with College of Letters & Science to design innovative new trainings and ongoing development for teaching assistants to help them develop as effective, equitable, and empathetic teachers. Her work is heavily influenced by her time at Eastern Michigan University where she received a B.S. in psychology and B.A. in dance in addition to her first M.A. in philosophy.

What’s Wrong with Active Learning?

Most educators have encountered the term ‘active learning’ during their time teaching. After all it’s at the top of most lists of best practices for its efficacy and equitability in the classroom. But, few seem able to answer the question: what is active learning? As in, what is the essential core of active learning? Or what is active about it? This is a problem.

My research has uncovered serious issues with the empirical work that is used to support the efficacy of active learning. Studies range from showing large effects to minimal and even negative effects on student learning. What’s responsible for such wildly different conclusions? I argue it’s likely the very concept of active learning itself.

Active learning is currently experiencing something of an identity crisis. Often articles about active learning offer no definition of it, and the few that do, give a definition that is too vague and broad to be useful. As a result, vastly different activities are lumped together and treated as one homogenous category. After all it’s not obvious why we should think that an activity like a short turn-and-talk in a literature class and building a trebuchet in an engineering class belong in the same category. But they’re both active learning.

All this conceptual confusion has led to flaws in the research on active learning. If we are to ensure that active learning really deserves its title as an equitable best practice, we need to seriously reconsider the concept itself and refine it into a nuanced, precise term capable of directing more productive theoretical inquiry, empirical studies, and classroom implementations.