active learning means you participate collaborate with others and apply concepts to the real world it requires hard mental effort but leads to better retention and an understanding of the material that can be transferred to other situations to understand why active learning works so well it helps to know that when our brain decides what to remember it asks itself two fundamental questions can i understand and do i need to know when you ask can i understand your brain always puts the new information on the foundation of existing knowledge if the foundation is missing the brain has
no idea what to do with it and as a result it throws it away in other words your brain needs to build foundational neuron connections for new information to attach to which is both why active learning is more mental work but also essential for learning when we ask ourselves do i need to know our brain separates between the material it finds worth to remember and the one it can forget if it's unlikely that new information will ever be used again the brain is smart enough to throw it away if your brain finds that the information
is needed again say it could increase your social status the brain will store it in long-term memory to stay there and be easily recalled you just have to periodically use or think of it to understand how active learning is applied in classrooms let's look at the teachings of professor carl wyman a nobel prize winning physicist and a leading proponent of the method there are four steps to it step one prior to class the students read up on the fundamentals of a lesson so they get an idea of the terms and basic phenomena in class professor
wyman starts with a brief introduction and then gives questions to solve he will have students use clickers a little device on which students can answer multiple choice questions alternatively or for more complex problems worksheets can be handed out step 2 wyman projects a problem and asks all the students to select one of three possible answers using their clicker this has two benefits first the teacher gets an idea of how many of his students already understand the topic and second the students are now focused on the question they want to know if they are right it
is important though that the question is both challenging and interesting all this takes less than five minutes step three without telling the students how they voted and following eric mouser's peer instruction method which involves questions peer discussions votes and group discussions the students then discuss the question and their answers with one or two classmates ideally with someone who disagrees with their own opinion during the discussion the students have to come up with a reason for their answer and why the others may be wrong meanwhile the instructor is circling around listening in to gauge student thinking
and answering brief questions then there will be a second clicker vote and only now the results will be shown typically the second vote will be much better than the first as students learn a great deal from their discussions an ideal question will have about a third correct on the first vote and 85 percent correct on the second all this takes around seven minutes step four now the professor leads a follow-up discussion with all the students to provide feedback exploring the different reasoning which one is correct and importantly which is incorrect and why only at the
very end professor wyman will explain the correct solution and answer follow-up questions ascertaining the student's understanding from the questions they ask he decides if it is time to move on all of which takes around 10 minutes there are three reasons why active learning works so well first the students are actively working on interesting problems and as they all voted for an answer right at the beginning they have a stake in the outcome that means their brains decide that the information covered is important to be remembered and are hence more receptive for learning second by solving
problems alone and in groups they dive deeply into the material explaining to appear engages novel mental processes as a result they construct new synaptic pathways inside their brains third the explanation from the teacher comes only once the students already formed their own thoughts about the concept at this point the explanation makes more sense as the brain can connect the new information to all the thought it had just built the correct answers have a solid foundation a large body of research has shown big differences in the outcomes between passive and active learning in one carefully executed
experiment physics instructors taught their course in two ways some classes were taught in a conventional style and others using active learning even though the teachers were the same and the students were similar on average the active learners doubled their understanding when they were tested at the end of the course [Music] other experiments have shown that long-term retention is higher as well students that take conventional lecture that is followed by a test forget around ninety percent of the material within six months in an active learning environment students can retain more than seventy percent of what they
have learned two years later sometimes teachers show a problem and then demonstrate to the class how to solve it they believe that they can just transfer their own thinking into the student's head through an explanation unfortunately for new ideas a brain doesn't work that way unless the brain actively constructs those ideas within it is as if the material was never heard how about you have you ever learned in an active learning environment and if so how does it compare to learning the conventional way [Music] sprouts videos are published under the creative commons license that means
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