This stuff is super important and it is good that it is being researched seriously. The money shot is right here in the abstract
>We find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less.
>We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning.
In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun. The problem is that "the algorithms" (whatever recommendation ML algorithm YouTube has) works so damned well we are sucked into this endless shallow junkfood dopamine loop of videos that give us just the right amount of dopamine to click on the next one.
I think this is close, but reversed. Learning requires a struggle (eg effort), but you can struggle without learning (eg you aren't getting good feedback).
In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun.
-- The quote is about active learning, learning that involves the student in the education process. I don't think the subjective rating of that as "not fun" is a given. Rather, I think this subjective impression from the entire context of a student's activities.
It's pretty standard to expect "engaged" students to be happier than disengaged students. But students who are pressured to be engaged but don't engage are most unhappy of all. And today, students are confronted with a lot of easy, disengaged "junkfood" entertainment and are often working many hours a week along with school (or simply work endless hours of homework, etc). Under those circumstances, sure, learning that pushes the student to participate might get negative reviews. But I don't that justifies defining participatory learning "not fun" ipso-facto.
There are other factors, too (some mentioned further down in the article). Active learning classes are often messier, by which I mean that there is a lot of people speaking up, sometimes things are proposed that are not quite right and there is discussion of how it is wrong and how to make it right, etc.
I don't teach all my classes in 100% active ways, but it has seemed to me that in the classes that are more active I get significantly lower student evaluations. People often rate my knowledge of the subject as less, for instance. That is, when I ask in class, "What do you think?" at least some of them perceive, at least a bit, that I am not sure.
The subject matter, class size, and student body probably lent itself better to more active classes but I certainly found many of my business school classes more engaging than many of the big undergrad lectures I sat through. (There were some really good undergrad lecture classes as well although they were generally not core engineering/science classes.)
I'm sure it's also true that forced participation in classes is doubtless tough for a lot of people. Again, not really an issue in business grad school, but I can see it being something of a problem in other settings.
"A learning should be fun" assumption gets baked into an awful lot of discussions around Ed Tech and related topics. It's not that learning should always be painful/boring/etc. but I'm not sure that coming at education from an angle where if it's not enjoyable there must be something wrong is the right one.
I don't know, I actually do find learning fun. Even when it gets hard and frustrating. Almost especially when it gets hard and frustrating. It feels good when something finally clicks. Though I find it's not until some time later i realize this 'thing' I used to struggle with is now easy to understand.
For me it's the same reason I like video games. It gives me the same feeling learning something new, especially when I can connect it somehow to previous knowledge, that completing an especially frustrating section of a game I have to do over and over before I get it does.
Quite. I spent the first 15 years of my adult life learning to be a microbiologist. I can't say I found any of that process being "fun", though a quite a bit (but by no means all) of it was interesting.
X must be fun is baked into most areas of life. It's the closest thing we have to a shared existential story in the west. Live to have fun. It's the default position to a lot of questions. Some education can be mentally taxing but deeply engaging or fun in a way that's difficult to describe.
I agree with you, enjoyment shouldn't be evidence of an education result.
Struggle is not opposite of fun. Too much can be frustrating but in the exact right amount it can be an even bigger source of motivation when you manage to pass the next hurdle.
Playing sports for example is a struggle, most people think it's fun, and you get physical benefits afterwards.
As someone who learned English mostly from entertainment or practical needs (online, living in a non-English speaking country), and never really spent much time "learning" rules beyond 12 — no more than my birth language, which I statistically mastered — I very much disagree, if you stop there. This is the old view of learning, and it's just wrong cognitively (neurologically).
Struggling is feeling "under", less than, overwhelmed, and it brings fear or anger as primary emotions — red signs that this isn't a good path. By that point, you've switched a lot of attention away from the problem to focus on saving yourself, because genetic legacy is funny like that.
If you're enjoying however, you're learning to the best of your abilities, cognitively.
This isn't to say that the greatest games aren't hard at times. Difficulty can and should be enjoyable (it means you're in the sweet spot for improvement).
This isn't to say that enjoyment and learning are related in general, beyond the former enabling the latter in specific contexts. But when you're struggling, you're indeed not learning, you're stuck; what you need is a new teacher, a new way to understand the thing, which may be yourself — at which point you begin to "play" with it as we say it (words carry all the answers we need, don't they?)
However it's done, learning feels very good, like this inner "win" or "eureka" feeling. If you're struggling, you've failed. Already. You're in above your head. Even understanding would be partial and based on weak prerequisites, it's doesn't bode well for the next chapter, or the next task. Difficulty and pain are hard, but the good kind of hard, the one that teaches you, when pain becomes gain; it's a well known "truth" of life and the body by athletes, and the mind works just the same.
In fact, the learning itself happens afterwards, when you sleep: maximum learning is enabled by sleep in most mammals apparently. Who would have thought the most active learner in class is the one dozing near the heater, haha.
I agree with you. I had similar experiences of an unexplained smooth euphoria and finding new angles as a useful tool for progress.
I do not buy the distrust of negative emotion. There are keys to the kingdom hidden inside fear and anger. Talking those feelings out and getting to the driving principle underneath them has been worth it's weight in gold.
The relevance realization pathway you describe is important, the successive eurakas are valuable. But when you go off into the unknown that is not structured like a language or a school topic, the Eurekas are several or more steps apart. You need to cope with the overload to grow your output. You are learning to deal with a character challenge.
I think the balance between being vulnerable with your limitations and fears whilst stimulated enough to push to the limit of your competence and minimize flaw in your output and the sword and shield to performance.
High speed learning is different to performance. It is to live on the boundary between being a fool and wise. Struggle is no issue, only credibility matters for truth seeking.
It seems I was too hasty in writing my view, because yours is much better worded and I agree wholeheartedly. The only difference seems to be meta: I indeed consider overcoming struggles a form of learning; but you're learning that (to overcome struggles, to push your character), it takes precedence over the underlying topic in my mind. But that's a very minor point, unimportant.
On the "distrust of negative emotion", that's a very good point. I very much believe that emotions are but the body's language, neither good nor bad, just informational. Fear, anger, sadness are powerful drives ("energy" in some circles), warnings too, and one should certainly listen to — but not be driven by — one's emotions.
I essentially mean to warn against two weaknesses that bit me back years down the line:
- partial learning, more mechanical than understood, typically because of weak foundations (and "struggling" is often a sign of that for me). I usually need to go one step back and "clean it" closer to 100% to unlock the previous struggle — I'll confess I still apply my good old math method to do dozens if not hundreds of exercises until something becomes automatic). For instance if past 1 chapter I still don't understand a paragraph of what I'm reading, I'll humbly admit it's too high level and take another book more suited to my level — and try to really ace it, knowing the steepness of following learning curve.
- (in the case of real difficulties to learn, prolonged, spanning multiple topics, etc.) failing to see the elephant in the room, typically because it's unrelated to learning, and that's pretty strong an obstacle in social settings like school, teams, etc. Imposter syndrome, health issues, and all that. Essentially, the idea that however difficult and overwhelming, learning should never feel "bad", like nauseating or abnormally tiring or depressing. Trying to switch on some "playful" mindset and seeing how that goes is a good indicator for me: if I can't even play, the issue is probably not the topic, but myself — cue break, food, meditation, coffee, talking, philosophy, whatever but fix the machine (me) before attempting to work it out more.
This is really about academic style or skill learning, classic lectures + exercises with teachers, online trainings, reading a book, practicing, etc. Life, more generally, is very much like you wonderfully describe.
Partial learning, lack of foundation. 110% agree that is a problem that happens to me, even recently. First principles are so important.
Yeah the mysterious room elephant. Similar to the nuggets of gold underneath fear or anger, but not the same. I don't have a solution to that either. It seems we can only work so much and getting the preparation but also the supply to meet our need demands lined up so we can fulfill them consistently and keep work performance up, is a big life problem.
Using play as an indicator for unmet needs is interesting. I find myself alternating between work and play, but they are clearly defined as two separate tasks. And yes when I play it becomes much easier to prioritize getting my needs met than under the gun of work.
On the topic of positive emotion. Supposedly most of the positive emotion we get in life is in the pursuit of a goal. That may explain why we do best at the things we enjoy and the necessity of positive emotion for work. Maybe we have to balance the driving power of positive emotion with the crushing weight lifting negative emotion that comes from the challenge of working (and life in general). Too enjoyable and it's too easy, you're not working at your limit. Too negative and you're dying, you're likely to under perform but also not hit your target. Hmm interesting. I appreciate your post it put me in a mindset I had not explored in a while.
The feeling is mutual, you piked my interest. Thanks for the food for thought.
About positive emotions in work, my personal take-away — took me two decades to figure this out, but I think it's really true:
The goal is not to try really hard to always do what you love.
It's about trying really hard to always love what you do.
(Now or ever.)
I could write a book about why and how but this is probably not the place. One key though is exactly this playful mindset, it lets us redefine, in thought only, how we feel while doing something. We can always at least choose to love our effort, our doing it, try to mini-game quality or production — whatever makes it easier and ourselves better in one fell swoop.
Well I saw a talk by a designer woman who put out the massive oversized text wrapped across mall walls at escalator junctions and whatever else in the 80s.
She described her most productive work in life as being a form of "serious play". That has stuck with me and now you're saying something similar too.
Active learning is about promoting things like talking to other students face to face or on classroom-based chat systems about assignments.
It's more of a social media flavored experience compared to watching a lecture. And it feels a lot less like work.
I don't think I've seen active learning implemented very well, but in my experience the more actively students work in groups and discuss their opinions the less actual material you cover.
What does happen in group settings is that the best students re-explain the material to students not doing so well. This might lead to increased average performance, but I'm sure they've accounted for that.
This sounds like a response from a humanities or business major.
If you've never felt utterly defeated practicing a difficult passage in music
or pulling an all-nighter on a problem set, then I question the extent of
learning.
I've learned more from the chess and go games I've lost (leaving me in tears) than the ones I won.
Bandying opinions with one's peers is a form of learning, yes, but it's a
nonrigorous one that I wouldn't pay tuition for.
My experience is in the context of teaching mathematics in particular.
Mainly calculus because that is be there level at which pedagogy theories are typically experimented with most. In upper level classes are typically straight lectures.
Edit: I meant "opinion" in the sense that you don't really have much to say to your partner about a technical topic you don't understand yet. And in much of math you don't have intuition you can verbalize until you've worked many problems, which means the time to have conversations with your peers about it is probably not the same time you're learning it for the first time. That may explain why in practice the students who read the book before hand are often really just instructing the other students when they are having discussions.
I've learned the most from struggling through the end problems in a PhD textbook; where when I go to sleep I feel so stupid and defeated that I wonder why I bother. Somehow doing this long enough you actually learn things...
> In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun.
The article compares active learning to passive learning like listening to lectures, and sees evidence that active learning is better. I don't think many people consider academic lectures more "fun" than active learning. The article also suggests that the reason why increased cognitive effort makes people feel like their learning less isn't because it isn't fun, but rather because students associate increased cognitive effort with poor learning:
> Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning.
I know you're using "money shot" as slang for "key take-away" or tl:dr but it's origin is intertwined with porn - you might want to re-consider keeping it as a goto phrase online and in the real.
Not bad advice from GP when you get to the "see also" section in your linked wikipedia article (pretty much immediately there with one scroll on mobile).
When I was a professor (natural sciences) I decided to play around with different learning systems to see what worked best. I discovered the obvious that learning depth is negatively correlated with the student evaluation of their lecturer during the course and positively correlated a year later (students hate learning when they do it, but love the subject so much later that they choose your next course the following year because they learnt so much).
The more useful thing I discovered was getting the students to read the lecture notes before a lecture boosted the class average by 10% points. 10 minutes spent reading the lecture notes before the lecture and answering a few simple online multiple choice questions about the lecture was surprisingly effectively at improving learning. My assumption is it cut down on the novelty overload effect where the student’s brains shut down mid-lecture and so they were able to get more out of the lectures.
> AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It's like the book club from hell.
>> Not just AWS- that's an Amazon-wide technique. And it's freaking amazing. You should try it.
I half wonder if in lecture format, a silent 60 minute reading session would be more productive. Lecturer is available to answer questions but other than that the textbook is the guide.
Interesting approach. The difficulty, of course, lies in how to get students to actually read the lecture notes, aka do their homework, but the principle seems sound enough to me.
In one of the classes I’ve taught we had a similar approach where we had students do a homework assignment beforehand where they would encounter the very problem that he material in the lecture would address. It did seem to make the students who actually did their homework more attentive.
The way I did it was by having an online quiz (three questions) that they could answer from just reading the lecture notes. I would only give access to each quiz a couple of nights before the lecture block was started (4-6 lectures) and they had to complete each mini quiz before the first lecture in the block.
Rather pathetically admin made me change this approach after a couple of years to two large quiz’s because I was testing the students “too much”. 3 quick questions every week was too much, but 30 long questions every 6 weeks was OK even if it didn’t get the students to read the notes.
Robert Bjork [0] talks a lot about this, in particular in [1], and also in his 1h long lecture "How we learn vs how we think we learn" [2].
It's important to distinguish between "performance" (how well you're doing right now) vs "learning" (how well you do after some time delay).
Compare blocked practice with interleaved practice. Suppose you're practicing calculating the area of different geometric figures of types A, B, C, etc.
Blocked practice means you do problems in the order of: AAAABBBBCCCC, etc.
Interleaved practice means you mix them up: ACCBAABACA, etc.
Blocked practice increases your performance (how well you're doing right now) because problems of the same type cluster together, i.e. you're able to "cache" the right formula and just plug in the numbers. But this doesn't help learning, because you're not practicing recognizing what features of the figure should prompt you to retrieve which formula from memory.
Interleaved practice reduces your performance, because more cognitive effort is required to retrieve the right formula, you might get it wrong, etc. But it improves learning, because you're training yourself to recognize which figure requires which formula.
So "desirable difficulties" can be introduced (of which interleaving is one) to increase learning at the cost of reducing performance.
I learned everything doing problem sets, and was completely lost during lecture. For every gifted undergrad who can integrate in real-time the lecturer's material, there are dozens if not hundreds of us normal folk who need to work things out at our own pace. With the advent of AI feedback systems, hopefully the western european notion of lecture becomes a thing of the past.
Non-interactive big room lectures can work but, in my experience, mostly by really top-notch lecturers especially for topics that are a bit less technical or, at least, not wholly math centric.
One big issue I think is that the big lecture hall environment is something of an anachronism. There is something of a forcing function but, for the most part, with a modicum of production work, the video version can actually be more useful than the live one. (At conferences these days, which I mostly attend for the "hallway track" anyway, I find I usually prefer to watch the streaming feed than to be crammed in a room with 10,000 of my closest friends.)
The school model is a bit fascist. The youtube or video model is an interesting way for academics to propagate their ideas because only the people who actually want to be there, show up. The ability to get Q&A from a community of broad but like-minded people in their interest for the topic makes for an incredibly focused experience. Like being engrossed in a campfire horror story rather than being forced to listen to paint dry.
The big problem with video, that makes me still value text based tutorials from the yesteryear (2000s), is that it's very hard to search for a particular sentence or string of information in a video. The varied pacing and delivery of information between speakers can get vary frustrating when you have to break your work flow to get to that exact moment in a video where the guy repeats what you want to hear inbetween ums and ahhs, and his 3rd time explaining a very basic concept.
Text still allows the reader to be in control of the pace & is the most easily searchable for the right information, which is vital for maintaining focus & flow at work. Video needs to catch up to that, hopefully automatic transcription can save the day.
People who create video and audio content should definitely consider getting transcriptions made. Automated transcriptions are still pretty mediocre but I get all my podcasts transcribed by humans. It's valuable for a lot of reasons: SEO, listeners who prefer to consume text, and myself for reusing material in other forms.
The liveness is a separate issue which is open-and-shut. There are no real benefits to being physically present aside from the "theatricality" (in which case the topic has to be really nontechnical), and the benefits of pause/rewind are obvious.
The lecture format is just plain wrong. I can only assume it gained popularity in european academia because printed publication was too costly, and because the royal society liked to dress up and feel self-important?
I can't agree. I've been to many many non-interactive lectures and talks that were quite wonderful. It's a very different experience than just reading something. Of course it's not always better. But it's a wholly different experience.
And I'm pretty sure it pre-dates European court life.
Your conception of learning is quite distinct from the Asian one which is very clearly "pain is gain." The only lectures I emerged from where I felt "wonderful" were ones I completely understood -- that is, lectures in the humanities and arts in which I didn't have to flex a neuron.
Good lectures in the humanities are partly there to tell you why you know what you know and expand on that and reinforce it with a good structure built from knowledge. That doesn't require masochism or a sense of conscious pain to gain a benefit. Using pain as a single measure of learning is missing the mark. But yeah learning will always cost something, even if it's just time.
Note the intervention to prime a desired response to difficulty.
With active learning, it's clear that early description of the approach, its effectiveness, and that it often doesn't feel like that, improves student approval, and outcomes(IIRC).
With 'belonging interventions', priming at-risk freshman with a narrative of "everyone here struggles - you get help, work hard, and succeed" inoculates against a narrative of "I'm struggling - they made a mistake admitting me - I clearly don't belong here", flipping a feedback loop of (not)forming academic and emotional support networks and (not)seeking help, and (not)succeeding.
One fun corner of medical reform involves medical interventions that are cheap, easy, with little downside, large upside, and no disagreement that they should happen. And still often don't. Promptly getting aspirin when presenting to the ER with heart pain, I recall as an example. It's been a long-term process improvement struggle that the profession has been pursuing for decades now.
One reflection of the state of education process improvement, is that this is barely even a conversation yet. And perhaps something personalized semi-automated teaching can help with. Everyone gets an intervention 'punch list'.
For example, checking and rechecking that everyone, but especially students from no-previous-college families, has an "education is something I create for myself with help" model, instead of a "education is something the teacher does to me" model, seems something we might actually do, to great effect.
it's a very interesting research topic but I'm disappointed by the paper (after a very quick look).
one immediate question I had, after read the abstract, is how are they going to measure learning result. without looking into the testing material, I'd argue if the tests were not carefully designed, it could produce whatever result anyone likes, by adjust depth/width ratio of the given subject. maybe the testing materials are so well regarded in the field so there would be no justification necessary, but by ignoring the possibility to readers, it feels not trustworthy to me.
back to the explanation of the result, it's entirely possible that learners (and the authors) not able to draw distinctions between information and performance. I'd assume the traditional teaching would expose much more information to students (anecdotes, connections to other fields), but 'active' learning could give better result in performance building in a narrowed domain.
I'll read carefully into the paper sometime later, but for now, it's not a paper I'd recommend.
(feel free to downvote if I get anything wrong)
“The instructors did not see the TOLs [post-class test of learning], which were prepared independently by another author. 9) The author of the TOLs did not have access to the course materials or lecture slides and wrote the tests based only on a list of detailed learning objectives for each topic.”
The article keeps ranting about active learning, but only describes one form of it (physics demonstrations and "interactive quizzes"). The problem here is the complete lack of active learning tools in stem and the garbage that passes for it in a vacuum. (no pun intended)
One possible atypicality, is that Harvard freshmen have had unusually "excellent" pre-college teachers. Teachers clearly presenting well-organized information in an easily-accessible manner. And so are less likely than students with poorer teachers, to view understanding as something one creates for oneself, by wrestling with the material. So the wrestling of active learning is interpreted as a teaching fail. And the class overlaps and emphasizes the rude awakening that their pre-college learning strategies are no longer sufficient.
This reminds, also, of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Here, those who've truly learned more are also more reserved in their self-evaluation – while those given a more comforting-but-transient "gloss" of instruction overestimate their learning.
>We find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less.
>We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learning.
In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun. The problem is that "the algorithms" (whatever recommendation ML algorithm YouTube has) works so damned well we are sucked into this endless shallow junkfood dopamine loop of videos that give us just the right amount of dopamine to click on the next one.
If you're struggling, you're learning.