{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age","title":"Episode 22 | Active Learning Pedagogy: Why Engagement Beats Passive Reception","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":736,"description":"Episode SummaryIn May 2014, seven researchers at the University of Washington published a study so stark they compared it to a clinical trial that should have been stopped for benefit. They had pooled 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching. Their verdict: students in traditional lecture classes were 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that actively engaged them. Exam scores improved by about 6 percent. The case was, by the standards of education research, closed.In this episode we tell the story of the Freeman et al. (2014) meta-analysis and what the field learned in the decade that followed. We meet Eric Mazur, the Harvard physicist whose accidental discovery in 1991 became Peer Instruction. We unpack the equity finding of Theobald et al. (2020), which showed that active learning narrows achievement gaps for the students universities have historically underserved. We confront the most psychologically interesting result of the decade: students in active classrooms learn more but feel they have learned less, which helps explain why the better pedagogy keeps losing the popularity contest. And we ask the question that still haunts the field: if the evidence is this clear, why are more than half of STEM classrooms still being taught the way they were in 1950?Key Topics CoveredThe 2013 context: the PCAST report, the 60 percent STEM attrition rate, and why the field needed a meta-analytic verdictFreeman et al. (2014): 225 studies, the inclusion criteria, the random effects model, and the headline numbers (g = 0.47, 1.5 times the failure rate, 3,516 more students who failed under lecture)Carl Wieman's companion editorial and the \"pedagogical equivalent of bloodletting\" framingEric Mazur's origin story: the Force Concept Inventory, the student question that changed his career, and the birth of Peer InstructionThe bundle of active learning pedagogies: Peer Instruction, Flipped Classroom, Think Pair Share, POGIL, Problem Based Learning, Jigsaw, SCALE...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/FqjMDaQUSm1bYfkwwD6aDUnSGdwLjCiheWhxBb00zow/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84YjIz/YzkwMzlmNGM5YmEw/NTJkOGYyMTk0YTMw/ZWM0Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}