How to Promote Active Learning and Meaningful Assessments on College Campuses
During the final exam season that just ended, all my friends were studying hard in preparation. Some of them procrastinated and had to start cramming a couple days in advance. Some of them had exams on one evening and the next morning, and they had to burn themselves out by pulling all-nighters. Under such intense circumstances, seeing a friend with bloodshot eyes might not be uncommon for everyone. Last semester, it was the case for me. I remember vividly “burying” myself in the library for an entire day and napping on the library’s sofa for just an hour at night.
However, this semester, my mindset shifted. I studied for a proper amount of time and ensured sufficient sleep every day. The day before my exam, I even organized a tea tasting event with five friends and a tea master nearby. Now, you might ask, do I not care about exams?
Yes, I do care about exams because the scores influence my GPA and potentially my career, but since my learning style is strongly driven by interest, I favor active learning. Before exams I pondered, if I were to study day and night to cram concepts and problem solutions into my mind, can I say I am actively learning the materials? The answer that I came close to was no ——that could only be defined as quasi-active learning, because the end goal is to excel on those mandatory exams rather than to master the concepts and apply them (although there might be some correlations). Due to this reason, I consider some final assessments passive. However, active learners would actively chunk the knowledge and test themselves on their understanding without anyone forcing them to take an assessment. They decide to learn something because they care about it. And because of their curiosity and determination, they would willingly devote time and energy. As an active learner, I put more emphasis on my understanding and application of knowledge instead of a letter grade, which, as we all know, might not be an accurate reflection of our mastery of knowledge learned in classes. Despite this fact, students usually perform better academically through active learning, especially in the STEM fields, as shown by this research.
Although during the course registration period I considered all my four courses “interesting and useful”, I was still not very motivated during the exams season. First, my expectation of what I would learn and how I would learn was different from what the professors taught and how they taught. Therefore, when this contradiction between my imagination and the reality arose, I would feel slightly resistant to absorb the course materials. Second, the formative assessments are generally mechanical. From a programmer’s perspective, I believe in learning by doing, and that is why I would rather work on projects that require learners to creatively utilize the information than be tested on the memorization or simply the understanding of the knowledge. Third, these assessments are generally passive, meaning that the instructors design the exams based on their expectation while students might feel like they are forced to take those exams. When many of my friends talk about their final project or final exam, I would hear them say something like this in a morbid way, “I have a 15 page paper due soon and I have not started yet :( ”, or “Ugh, I have 2 exams tomorrow”. But there is an upside. Once the exams are over, it is time for “liberation”. You can throw out textbooks and all your notes for the class and never check solutions of exams or feedbacks for your papers.
Similar to Marx’s theory of alienation of labor, which states that workers are alienated from the process of production and the product under capitalist mode of production, it almost seems to me that students are alienated from the process of learning and the product of learning (i.e. written exams, paper, etc.). It is rare to hear anyone say “Yeah, I am going to take an exam and measure my knowledge!”, or something like “I can’t wait to start writing my paper on XXX”. But to be fair, the process of learning is painful most of the time. Even when I am writing this essay, I sometimes feel reluctant to proceed. The above analogy is there just to illustrate the relationship between the subjects of learning and learning itself.
Think about midterms and final exams, a few of my friends study for them merely to get good scores and forget the knowledge later on in their life. When being asked “why are you studying for these exams if you know you will forget them in the future”, their answers are “I don’t know, I guess I have to”. When students hear that final exams are not cumulative, most of them are happy because they need to study less. But, isn’t our goal of taking courses to understand and apply this knowledge? So why not be tested on these concepts once again in order to gain a more solid understanding?
Admittedly, assessments are necessary to keep track with students’ progress and give timely feedback to help them improve along the way. However, when many students start cramming knowledge right before exams or overemphasize the importance of memorization (of certain concepts or solutions to certain types of problems), that might not be an ideal situation. After all, students in the same class might have registered for different reasons, but the instructor is hardly aware of the needs of each student. Nevertheless, the instructor teaches everyone using the same framework and measures everyone using the same assessment.
This is the conflict between active learning and passive assessments. Active learners seem to have an idea of what they want to learn. Their rationales behind enrolling in a course might include fulfilling curiosity, gaining practical skills, or creating a product (such as a report or a tool) . However, formative assessments might not be driven by interest, as it is rare to see students who are excited about taking exams. In order to ensure fairness, formative assessments are made identical for all students, thus mismatching with different needs of different students.
Compared with university courses, MOOCs provide active learners with a much more flexible environment due to their accessibility and diversity, despite having a single-digit percentage completion rate. Learners on those online platforms could easily select a unit or a video module from the entire course to understand a particular concept. However, most university courses are systematic and rigid. With the rise of MOOCs in the 21st century, how should university courses change to complement the online learning environment? If university courses could evolve to fulfill different needs of the learners, more individuals could take initiatives in active learning and have more “free will” in what they want to learn and achieve.
All combined, I have compiled a list of my suggestions for both instructors and students.
For instructors:
- Teach for mastery. Here is a TED talk given by Sal Khan, who advocates for mastery learning and compares building a house to learning. This video inspired me when I felt frustrated after hitting a wall in a class.
- Evoke students’ curiosity. The purpose of learning boils down to evoke the curiosity of the learners, to make them passionate about learning, and to carry on the task of learning in their lifetime. One approach could be using head fakes like Randy Pausch (the creator of Alice program), where the instructor designs an environment to “trick” students to learn something without their realization.
- Give quick feedbacks and constructive suggestions. In order for students to learn from their mistakes, they not only need to know where they were wrong but also how to fix the problems. Perhaps a big test can be broken down into many quizzes to make learning progressive.
- Employ deliberate practice, a special type of purposeful and systematic practice, inside and outside of classrooms. For example, homework and tests could be designed using this concept to guide students on the right track. K. Anders Ericsson, the co-author of Peak, is a pioneer in this field.
For students:
- Ask why you take some classes (except for those required classes). It is always hard to know what to learn at the right moment of your life. Digging into the root of this question helps you organize your thoughts.
- Gamify the education system. Gamification refers to the application of game elements to non-game problems. There is an entire course on gamification. For example, Mark Rober spoke about the Super Mario Effect in a TED talk, stating that we could “focus on the Princess and not the pits, to stick with a task and learn more”.
- Chunk the information you learn. The goal of learning is not to forget, so be prepared to store them in your long term memory. Once in a while, you should deliberately recall the knowledge you have learned recently and commit them into your memory. It is also crucial to think of ways to apply them in your real life to increase your impression. If you want to become a more effective learner by understanding the science behind learning, you can try taking this course named Learning How to Learn.
Today, traditional mode of education is being challenged. As the demand from the society changes, the form of education should also adapt. By looking at the timeline of education technology, it is not hard to see that the evolution of education technology points to personalization, a significant component of active learning. Therefore, in the future, active learning should be emphasized. But in order to do this, the fundamental structure of curriculum and assessments needs to be transformed as well.
Under institutional systems like universities, these changes can not be implemented overnight. However, technology could be the catalyst. For example, the feedback and communication systems between the instructors and students could be improved by artificial intelligence. Currently, many professors are not able to know each student’s performance and progress in their class. In order to promote personalized learning, individualized analysis needs to be done for instructors to understand who needs additional assistance and challenges. There are some companies working on such areas, such as Knewton and Century Tech.
