With K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the country reconvening this autumn for in-person instruction — many after more than a year of remote or hybrid learning — some educators are calling for teachers to embrace more “active learning” methods in the classroom. These methods differ from traditional lecture formats by engaging students with in-class tasks like partner discussions to learn subject matter and reinforce core concepts. In studies, many active learning methods improve grades and student knowledge.

In a published Oct. 1 in Science, a group led by at Carnegie Mellon University is advocating for a fresh look at active learning and its potential as classrooms and lecture halls again fill with students. Two co-authors from the 91̽��’s Department of Biology — assistant teaching professor and lecturer emeritus — highlight the role that active learning methods have in promoting equity. In STEM education, active learning methods can eliminate inequities for students from underrepresented backgrounds, something Theobald and Freeman have studied as part of the UW’s Biology Education Research Group.

Theobald sat down with 91̽��News to talk about the current state of active learning methods, research into their effectiveness and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Q: You teach here at the UW. How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected teaching at colleges and universities?

ET: Oh, it’s had so many effects. There has been so much disruption — some that is easily recognized, and some that isn’t. For instance, people are touting that online learning is more accessible. And on the one hand, it is. For example, there’s no commute for students. But on the other hand, there are disadvantages in terms of accessibility. Students need quiet, private spaces that are free from distraction and a good internet connection. But with remote learning, the distractions from other parts of their lives become part of their “classroom.”

And that’s just considering logistics and practicality. What has really suffered in the pandemic is the community that students experience in the classroom. I think a lot of research in active learning methods has told us that those communities — those connections — are central to learning. In our piece, we try to drive home that students need each other. They need to learn from each other. And students need to understand that they’re not alone in the learning process. A lot of that is lost online.

What messages are you trying to send with this new article?

ET: I think the message we’re trying to send centers on what I and a ton of others are feeling right now. We’re going back to in-person teaching and learning. What will that look like? The group of us who came together to write this policy forum piece are all people who have made education research our life’s work. We think this return to in-person instruction is an opportunity to discuss and reflect. Going back to in-person instruction shouldn’t mean just going back to pre-pandemic teaching methods. What could be done better?

What are some active learning methods used today?

ET: Well, it really depends on what type of classroom or learning environment you’re talking about — whether K-12 or undergraduate.

For me, I teach at the undergraduate level. The methods you can employ there can take many forms: Turn to your neighbor and discuss this concept for a few minutes, or complete a short, in-class worksheet that reinforces a key concept.

We’re designing these active learning methods around the future assessments for course performance. They’re opportunities to practice. When you practice a musical instrument, you’re rehearsing for a performance later. Or when you practice a sport, it’s for a game later. Whatever the form, think of these active learning methods as a practice for the exams, projects and presentations that students can use to demonstrate how well they know the subject matter.

Which educational settings employ active learning methods?

ET: In general, higher education — particularly STEM education — is just a little bit behind K-12 in adopting active learning, I think. Before coming to UW, I worked as a middle and high school teacher, and active learning is how I was taught to teach. I couldn’t dream of walking into a class and just lecturing at my students. I would’ve been eaten alive.

In K-12 settings, I think there’s definitely value seen in active learning, and there has been a lot of research backing up the effectiveness of active learning in these settings. And I think in higher education settings, recent research backs up its effectiveness as well in improving learning outcomes, boosting grades and reducing inequities in student outcomes.

Could active learning methods be improved?

ET: Oh yes. In any teaching method, there is always room to improve. Studies show that active learning improves learning outcomes, but there’s also a lot of variation in the results. Why is that?

Well, one new focus as a potential answer is that you have to consider hearts as well as minds when teaching: Getting away from lectures and incorporating active learning will engage minds, but you can’t just have active learning alone. You also need to foster a sense of psychosocial “comfort” in the classroom.

How do you create this sense of psychosocial comfort?

ET: This is one of our avenues of active investigation! We’re exploring the hypothesis that students need this sense of psychosocial safety — knowing, for example, that their professor cares deeply about their success. What we’re trying to emphasize in the Science piece is that, by this theory, you need to do both: Students learn best in the types of collaborative environments that active learning methods can provide, and you also need to create an environment where students feel supported and feel that instructors care deeply about their success.

More research must be done to test this “heads and hearts” hypothesis, but we believe this could be key to bringing equity into STEM undergraduate education. It could go a long way toward improving equity in higher education classrooms.

For more information, contact Theobald at ellij@uw.edu.

Students from different backgrounds in the United States enter college with equal interest in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But that equal interest does not result in equal outcomes. Six years after starting an undergraduate STEM degree, roughly twice as many white students finished it compared to African American students.

A new study by researchers at the 91̽�� shows that teaching techniques in undergraduate STEM courses can significantly narrow gaps in course performance between students who are overrepresented and underrepresented in STEM. In a published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team reports that switching from passive techniques, such as traditional lectures, to inquiry-based “active learning” methods has a disproportionate benefit for underrepresented students, a term that encompasses low-income students and Latinx, African American, Native American, and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students.

The researchers used a meta-analysis approach, which combined student-level data from dozens of individual studies, to investigate how student performance changed when instructors incorporated more active learning methods into undergraduate STEM courses. They found that the achievement gap between overrepresented and underrepresented students narrowed on exam scores by 33% and course passing rates by 45%. For “high-intensity” active learning courses, in which students spent at least two-thirds of total class time engaged in active learning, the gap for exam scores shrank by 42% and 76%, respectively, for passing rates.

“Our study shows that broad implementation of active learning in undergraduate STEM courses can have a dramatic effect on reducing achievement gaps, resulting in more positive outcomes for students who are underrepresented in STEM fields,” said lead and co-corresponding author , a research associate and instructor in the 91̽��Department of Biology.

Research has shown that the achievement gaps in college STEM degree programs occur in part because students from underrepresented backgrounds tend to score lower on exams and have lower passing rates in entry-level undergraduate STEM courses. As a result, more underrepresented students switch majors or drop out of college. Six years after starting a STEM degree, 43% of white students and 52% of Asian American students have finished it. But completion rates drop to between 20 and 30% for Latinx, African American and Native American students, the National Academy of Sciences. Disparities in earning STEM degrees also exist between students from high- and low-income backgrounds, said Theobald.

College STEM courses using traditional, passive methods like lectures. In contrast, active learning techniques, which include a variety of discussion-based and problem-solving teaching methods, have not been widely adopted.

“You can sum up the difference between passive and active teaching methods in three simple words: ‘Ask, don’t tell,’” said co-corresponding author , principal lecturer in the 91̽��Department of Biology. “The goal of active learning is to engage students and get them to use their higher-order cognitive skills — instead of simply memorizing definitions.”

Active learning approaches include in-class group activities to work in depth on specific concepts, using class time for peer interaction, problem-solving assignments and calling on students at random.

In a , a 91̽��team led by Freeman used a more classical meta-analysis approach to show that active learning methods boost average student performance. For this new study, they used a different meta-analysis approach that tracks individual participants and breaks down the impact of active learning between overrepresented and underrepresented students. The researchers had to sort through more than 1,800 published and unpublished studies before finding the few dozen that both compared active and passive techniques and also had data on student demographics, according to Freeman. The student exam score data they used came from 15 studies — representing more than 9,000 students — while the data on passing rates came from 26 studies of more than 44,000 students.

On average, the team saw that active learning methods narrowed the achievement gaps significantly in both exam scores and passing rates between overrepresented and underrepresented student groups.

Future research is needed to understand why active learning disproportionately benefits students from underrepresented backgrounds. These learning techniques could create a more welcoming and inclusive environment, which may be especially important for students who often feel as if they don’t belong in STEM, or “feel excluded,” said Theobald. Active learning may also help students comprehend material better by taking them through complex concepts step by step, with regular check-in moments. This targeted, intensive practice may disproportionally help students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds, by ensuring they understand the material and don’t fall behind.

“These are loud, active rooms, with lots of dynamic interactions and opportunities to discuss and learn at a level you simply don’t get using a traditional lecture,” said Freeman.

Though they saw the greatest gap-narrowing effects in courses that devoted more than two-thirds of class time to active learning, both Freeman and Theobald caution instructors to take it slow in incorporating the approach.

“If you have a lecture-based course that you’ve already taught even just a few times, changing it can take a lot of work,” said Theobald. “College professors and instructors already have so many demands on their time — mentoring graduate students, applying for grants, conducting research, writing papers, grading, teaching. I understand that it’s a lot to ask them to flip their classes like this. So I advise people to start small and incorporate active learning techniques over time.”

The increasingly clear benefits of active learning may mean that colleges and universities, as well as professional societies, could provide incentives and assistance to professors and instructors who want to take the plunge, added Freeman.

“It’s time to reward people for getting good results in the classroom, because now we see that the benefits are even greater than we thought,” said Freeman.

91̽��co-authors on the study are Mariah Hill, Elisa Tran, Sweta Agrawal, Nicole Arroyo, Shawn Behling, Dianne Laboy Cintrón, Jacob Cooper, Gideon Dunster, Jared Grummer, Kelly Hennessey, Jennifer Hsiao, Nicole Iranon, Leonard Jones II, Hannah Jordt, Marlowe Keller, Melissa Lacey, Caitlin Littlefield, Alexander Lowe, Shannon Newman, Vera Okolo, Savannah Olroyd, Brandon Peecook, Sarah Pickett, David Slager, Itzue Caviedes-Solis, Kathryn Stanchak, Camila Valdebenito, Claire Williams and Kaitlin Zinsli. Additional co-authors are Nyasha Chambwe from the Institute for Systems Biology and Vasudha Sundaravaradan from Shoreline Community College. The research was funded by the 91̽��.

For more information, contact Freeman at 206-543-1620 or srf991@uw.edu and Theobald at 206-543-7321 or ellij@uw.edu. Theobald is currently traveling, but still available for media requests.

It has become an almost essential element of academic life, from college lecture halls to elementary classrooms: the group assignment.

Dreaded by some, loved by others, group projects typically aim to build teamwork and accountability while students learn about a topic. But depending on the assignment and the structure of the groups, a project can turn out to be a source of great frustration — for instructor and students alike — or the highlight of the school year.

Now a 91̽��-led study of college students has found that the social dynamics of a group, such as whether one person dominates the conversation or whether students work with a friend, affect academic performance. Put simply, the more comfortable students are, the better they do, which yields benefits beyond the classroom.

“They learn more,” explained , a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology and the lead author on the , published July 20 in PLOS ONE. “Employers are rating group work as the most important attribute in new recruits and new hires. If students are able to demonstrate that they have worked successfully in groups, it would seem that they should be more likely to land the job.”

Theobald is part of the UW’s Biology Education Research Group lab, formed by several faculty members in the Department of Biology about a decade ago to research how to most effectively teach biology to undergraduates.

A separate by the BERG lab on group work, published in the July issue of Active Learning in Higher Education, finds that college students, when given a choice of whom to sit and work with in a large classroom setting, gravitate toward those who appear most like them — whether by gender, race and ethnicity, or academic skills.

Over the years, research spanning K-12 through post-secondary education has pointed to the value of group work in fostering collaborative skills and in cementing learning through interaction. In the sciences, labs are a common, though not the only, form of group work, Theobald said. As with many disciplines, STEM fields lend themselves to readings, worksheets and other activities that can be completed by multiple people working together.

For this study, researchers compared survey responses and test scores stemming from two different project styles — single-group and “jigsaw” — with three assignments each during two sections of an introductory biology class at the UW. Each of the 770 students enrolled in one of the two sections of the course experienced each project style at least once. In a single-group activity, student groups completed a worksheet together, relying on their notes and textbooks. In a jigsaw, student groups were assigned specific sections of the worksheet; students then were shuffled to new groups in which each person in the group had completed a different section of the worksheet and could teach their new groupmates what they had learned. Students took an eight-question test after each assignment.

The study found that students who reported a “dominator” in the group fared worse on the tests than those who didn’t express that concern. It also found that students who said they were comfortable in their group performed better than those who said they were less comfortable.

The jigsaw activity appeared to result in more collaboration: Students were 67 percent less likely to report a dominator in jigsaws than in single-group activities. “This suggests that jigsaw activities with intentional structure more effectively promote equity than group activities with less intentional structure,” researchers wrote.

The nearly 770 students who completed all the assignments, tests and surveys had formed two- and three-person groups with those who sat near them in class. (Jigsaw assignments later shuffled initial groups.) Two-thirds of participants were female; people of color, including students who identify as Asian, Under-Represented Minority, and International, made up more than half of respondents.

While the gender and racial and ethnic makeup of the participants informed the study, Theobald said, researchers don’t have details on who worked with whom so as to extrapolate from the composition of groups. For instance, were the experiences of women who worked with men different from those of women who worked in all-female groups? If a group contained only one person of color, what was that person’s experience compared to the rest of the group? That kind of information is ripe for further research, Theobald said.

However, one noticeable data point emerged: International and Asian American students were six times as likely to report a dominator than white American students. “Not all students experience group work the same way,” researchers wrote in the study. “If one student dominates a conversation, it can be particularly jarring to students from cultural backgrounds that place more emphasis on introspection and thinking on one’s own as opposed to a direct relationship between talking as a way to work through ideas.”

��Though the data was collected from college students, the findings translate to other settings, Theobald said. She pointed to a Google conducted to determine what made groups successful — establishing group routines and expectations (“norms”) and adding a brief window at the beginning of work time for casual talk. Such findings, along with those of the 91̽��study, can inform employers as well as K-12 teachers about productive group work, she said.

The younger the students, the more structure a teacher is likely to have to establish, Theobald added. But when teachers make an assignment sufficiently interesting and complex, and manage student behavior, there is a potential for students to work together happily and productively.

“If we can get our groups to be more comfortable, students should learn better and work better,” Theobald said.

The National Science Foundation funded the study.

Co-authors on the paper were , principal lecturer in biology, and , faculty coordinator for biology instruction, both at the UW; Sarah Eddy of Florida International University; and Daniel Grunspan of Arizona State University.

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For more information, contact Theobald at ellij@uw.edu.

Grant number: NSF DUE 1244847