The Risk and Promise of Active Learning for STEM Education

Teams of academics from several disciplines came together to consolidate recent results on STEM learning in order to provide a focused definition of active learning as well as recommendations for current practice and future study.

Fremont, CA: The demand for high-quality STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education has never been greater, yet educators are still grappling with how to help children learn these subjects most effectively. Although "active learning," a potential instructional technique, has grown more common in undergraduate STEM education, this approach to education is ill-defined, and the features of efficient active learning are yet unknown.

Active learning: Risk and Promise

Many educators believe that active-learning tactics for undergraduate STEM education, which involve a variety of hands-on learning modalities and a focus on student engagement, are extremely effective. They also seem to produce more fair outcomes in STEM fields for students from underrepresented groups. In previous studies, active learning was widely used as a broad umbrella word to describe an alternative to the standard lecture, in which students sit quietly and take notes while listening to their lecturer. Participation in flipped classrooms, use of clickers or other student response systems, and involvement with computerized conversational agents have all been cited as examples of active learning.

Researchers believe that their new paper will break down traditional academic barriers by fostering cross-disciplinary research, including educational and cognitive psychology, as well as instruction in a variety of STEM sectors. Lombardi and his coauthors provide an active learning paradigm that they feel will be valuable for researchers and educators who want to help students learn more about STEM subjects. Future studies will open STEM to more students, particularly those who have been demeaned and underrepresented in traditional modalities of education, if it can assist educators in better understanding how to promote students' agency during the instructional process.

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