Active Learning
31 Why Use Active Learning in Smaller Classes?
Observe & Consider
Teaching in smaller classes offers all kinds of advantages: instructors can usually learn each student’s name, tailor their instruction to class interests and ability levels, manage collaborative and cooperative projects, and more easily have meaningful interactions, including discussions, with the whole class. While smaller class sizes seem in some ways to lend themselves naturally to more effective active learning, there’s no guarantee that a class will be actively engaged in learning simply because there are fewer students. Similarly, we should be careful not to confuse activity with learning; it is not the case that just because students are actively doing things that they are experiencing meaningful learning, in fact, some kinds of activity may actually detract from learning goals and prove detrimental in the long term. With that caveat in place, we believe that there are active learning is generally both a welcome and effective addition to most small to medium sized courses.
As a general rule, we’d suggest that active learning activities are most effective when they:
- Promote learners’ thoughtful engagement with course material and the learning process
- Are accompanied by clear instructions and timely feedback (including any necessary correction)
- Are intentionally aligned with specific learning outcomes.
On this page we’ll highlight some of the evidence for the impact of active learning practices on lerarning in smaller classes, focusing on two low-risk, high-impact elements: involvement and student cooperation and collaboration.
Why Involvement Matters
The highly influential educational researcher Alexander “Sandy” Astin (now emeritus at UCLA) spent much of his research career trying to understand which variables are most likely to predict student success in college. Through the course of his research, he became convinced that what he called “student involvement” was central to undergraduate success. In a now famous article, first published in 1984, Astin defined involvement as “the amount of physical and psychological energy that the student devotes to the academic experience,” and argued that the amount of student learning and personal development that learners experience in an academic setting is directly correlated to the quality and quantity of the learner’s involvement. Astin believed that the consequences of his findings were fairly clear: in order for a particular curriculum to succeed, above all else it must “elicit sufficient student effort and investment of energy,” which meant that educators should “focus less on what they do and more on what the student does: how motivated the student is and how much time and energy the student devotes to the learning process.”
How Involvement Affects Learning
In the subsequent decades, Astin’s ideas have been deeply influenced several important developments in higher education, especially the development of