What was interesting to me is that the study found that student resistance to active learning was not high - most students appreciated and engaged in the active learning activities. The difficulty for many instructors working in an environment in which student evaluation of teaching (SET) is used to assess teaching ability, Likert ratings below 4 may be considered to be low. However, this paper reminds us that a SET rating above 3 means that most students appreciate the experience. But excellent teachers may be accustomed to the vast majority of students appreciating the learning experience, not just most students. So maybe a significant finding of this research is that teachers need to be satisfied - find solace - in the fact that active learning reaches most students.
The other interesting finding is that students noted that instructors typically use explanations to alleviate resistance to active learning. That is, that instructors explain to students what is expected of them for the activity and how it will benefit their learning. The statistical analysis in this paper, however, indicates that facilitation efforts may be more effective at reducing student resistance. Facilitation strategies include instructor demeanor toward the students and the activity, inviting students to ask questions about the activity, walking around the room to assist student teams, soliciting student feedback on the activity, and confronting students unengaged in the activity. The last two seemed to have the lowest impact on alleviating student resistance.
So, some good advice backed by evidence for responding to student resistance to active learning: facilitate student engagement with the activities by engaging with the students during the activity and being interested/happy/excited about the activity and how students are interacting with the activity.
There are limitations to the study and I appreciate the authors clearly indicating these. The participating classes were self-selected. The participating classes were not observed by a third party to corroborate the student and instructor ratings of the nature of the class environment. But the authors correctly indicate that some of the key aspects of the study would not have been caught by this triangulation as it is difficult to know/observe/measure students internal environment regarding how they value or emotionally respond to a learning activity. In addition, the low number of classes and student enrollment means that there is the concern of variability within the class being greater than the variability between classes. But this is also difficult to address because different students will perceive the course differently - not all students will observe how the instructor is facilitating their peers’ learning because they themselves are engaged with the learning activity. I am not sure what could have been done to address these limitations except to choose from a wider pool of volunteer classes to try and avoid participant bias. But even then, it is the ones that don’t want to participate that will solve this limitation but you can’t make someone participate in research if they don’t want to.
One set of questions raised by our journal club was should a SET rating of 3 be sufficient to persist with an active learning strategy? Should SETs dictate the learning strategy we implement? Should SETs dictate how faculty evaluation committees reward good teaching? These questions remind me of a large meta-analysis of SETs which concluded with a scathing indictment that I think deserves quoting in full:
In turn, our findings indicate that depending on their institutional focus, universities and colleges may need to give appropriate weight to SET ratings when evaluating their professors. Universities and colleges focused on student learning may need to give minimal or no weight to SET ratings. In contrast, universities and colleges focused on students' perceptions or satisfaction rather than learning may want to evaluate their faculty's teaching using primarily or exclusively SET ratings, emphasize to their faculty members the need to obtain as high SET ratings as possible (i.e., preferably the perfect ratings), and systematically terminate those faculty members who do not meet the standards. For example, they may need to terminate all faculty members who do not exceed the average SET ratings of the department or the university, the standard of satisfactory teaching used in some departments and universities today despite common sense objections that not every faculty member can be above the average. (Uttl, White & Gonzalez, 2017)
We also distinguished between how we, as instructors explain an activity to our students vs facilitating the activity and considered why facilitation might be more effective at reducing student resistance to active learning than explanation? I wonder if this is the difference between attending to the cognitive vs the affective domain of learning? Explaining why a particular activity is good for students gets at their rational side. But resistance, I think, is rarely rational. In contrast, facilitating an active learning experience allows students to directly interact with the instructor and may alleviate any tension or fear that students might have toward publically performing the activity. Facilitating the activity is a way for instructors to join students in the messy business of learning. And I think joining the students in learning rather than standing aloof while they carry out the activity may be critical to students feeling better about risking failure in front of their peers.
Our discussion ended with acknowledging that studies have shown that student engagement promotes student learning outcomes, but oftentimes students are internally engaged with the ideas/content. It is difficult (impossible?) to assess this level of engagement in contrast to the more easily assessed degree of classroom noise. One aspect that instructors who implement active learning need to be careful with is assuming that talking during the activity indicates student engagement and therefore that learning is occurring. Sometimes that noise is actually a discussion of who won the hockey game the night before or which Netflix show is currently being binge-watched. Instructors need to remember that sometimes the best engagement with learning occurs when the class is quiet as a result of students thinking about the implications of what was just discussed.
Like all teaching and learning, context matters.
Resources
Finelli, B. C. J., Nguyen, K., Demonbrun, M., Borrego, M., Prince, M., Husman, J., … Waters, C. K. (2018). Reducing student resistance to active learning: Strategies for instructors. Journal of College Science Teaching, 47(5), 80–91.Uttl, B., White, C. A., & Gonzalez, D. W. (2017). Meta-analysis of faculty’s teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 54, 22–42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2016.08.007
