Active Learning Methods and the Development of Expertise

Imagine, for a moment, two sections of a university introductory physics course. The students in these two sections were alike in their performance on tests and engagement with the topic. The instructors for these two sections were well regarded for their teaching and have been doing so for many years. The format for each section was the same: three, 50-minute PowerPoint lectures per week given in a large lecture hall, homework assignments and tutored sessions.

Now imagine for a moment that for one week, the instructor in one of those sections was replaced by a couple of graduate students with limited teaching experience when compared with the instructor of the other section.

How would you figure things would have faired? Would the students in the section with the experienced instructor learn more that week than the students in the section with the graduate students? What if I told you the graduate student instructors also changed the methodology for teaching the students in their section during that week?

So, these students were split into small groups and given very tough physics problems in the form of problems to be solved. Each group’s answer was submitted electronically to the instructor. While one graduate student was doing this, the other would walk around the class listening in on group discussions and offering assistance when warranted. If it seemed that most groups were struggling with the problem, one of the grad student instructors would provide a very short lecture to the entire class.

Which section, at the end of that week, do you think performed better on knowledge tests of the concepts that were covered?

No need to imagine any more as this is something that actually did happen. Led by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman while at the University of British Columbia and two of Wieman’s students (the two who instructed the one section of the course for a week) found a sizable difference in learning between the two sections. The section taught by the experienced teachers using lecture scored 41% on average while the section taught by the inexperienced grad students using peer interaction, problem solving and feedback averaged 74%.

You can read more about the research here. This also led to the creation of an initiative to improve science teaching at UBC. Almost twenty years on since that initial experiment was conducted and the university is now considered a world leader in STEM education.

You might be saying that you get it. You already buy into active over passive teaching methods, like the flipped classroom approach that was used here, and as soon as I told you that that is what was being used by the experimental section, it was obvious which group of students was going to produce better learning results.

“Give me more specifics!” you say.

You may be familiar with the en vogue shift away from teacher and towards facilitator as a better descriptor for the role of the instructor in an active learning environment. Carl Wieman says that instructors must be cognitive coaches and that students must be prepared to work extremely hard to practice the cognitive components of expertise. Wieman says building such cognitive expertise in a subject would include

1. the knowledge unique to that subject

2. the structures or frameworks by which that knowledge is organized and

3. the way subject matter experts track their thinking when solving a problem

In the book Peak: How to Master Almost Anything, co-author Anders Ericsson, an expert in the field of human expertise, notes the Wieman experiment as a good example of how expertise should be developed. Ericsson comments on Wieman’s methods, showing how they relate to what he has learned about the pursuit of expertise. That includes the following.

Define the standard — you must have a deep understanding of how the brightest, most skillful people in a particularly field do what they do and know what they know if you want to make a mold for creating more experts in that field. This is reflected in Wieman’s three cognitive components noted above and is already fairly well established in the domain of physics. How well defined is it in your field?

Outline the step-by-step process — Like traditional scaffolding, break the standard into pieces, connecting one piece to the next in a progressive pattern to show a learner the path. However, unlike traditional scaffolding, these step-by-step frameworks must lead to what Ericsson calls the creation of mental representations within the learner. Having learners grapple directly with problems and solutions creates a mental representation. The objective is skill, not knowledge. Knowledge will be acquired along the way. In the experimental group, this was characterized by the problems handed out each class for the students to solve.

Push comfort zones but not too much — Similar to Vygotsky’s work on Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) becoming really good at something means being challenged but not challenged too much. In Wieman’s experiment, the problems that were handed out during class time for student groups to solve and report on were first pre-tested with a couple of students from that section. These students were encouraged to think out loud as they solved the problems so that Wieman and his students could understand their thought processes. They were then able to make modifications to some questions to reduce ambiguity as well as cull questions that were too hard or too easy. They then repeated this process again with a second pair of volunteer students before going live with the entire class.

Provide as much feedback in as many different ways as you can — Feedback is information designed to close a gap. The gap exists because of the difference between some future state and some present state. Here, the future state is what the students in this difficult physics class should be able to do. The present state is where they are at this very moment with what they can do. The gap is the difference between the two. In the experiment, feedback came from peers, it came from the instructors, and it came from the problems that had to be solved. It was immediate and it was often — two key considerations to the creation of quality feedback. This, Ericsson says, is how mental representations will form and strengthen.

Thinking about learning as a journey towards expertise may be a good way of improving the teaching and learning process. Promoting mastery (i.e., really learning a subject) over performance (i.e., getting the necessary grades in a subject) reflects a desire to be excellent. I wrote about this in a previous post. What Wieman tried in his experiment and what was then rolled out for science-based instructors at the University of British Columbia, Ericsson would refer to as aspects of a topic he calls deliberate practice. We’ve started to touch on the concept here and seen a wildly successful real life example of how active learning methodologies can be connected to the pursuit of expertise. I’ll talk more about deliberate practice and expertise next time around.