Shane Dizon sent a great email to the list this week about active learning. He referenced a post in the Tax Law Prof. Blog. If you missed it, you should definitely read it. I copied most of the information below.
"I’m sure a few of you may have caught this on Tax Prof Blog (common regular reading for many podium professors, so that will help with signal boosting) – but this is an article that is extremely relevant to work in ASP.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/39/19251.full.pdf
There are several really important takeaways to this random-assignment study:
(1) The contrast between students feeling that passive learning (here, being talked at by really talented lectures) helped them learn more, when they actually did worse on a learning test than students who received the same material through active learning and felt they learned less (precisely because of the difficulty and discomfort of doing that correctly).
(2) This has obvious implications for the heavily active learning environments needed for us in ASP to be successful.
(a) It helps with messaging to students who simply want to be talked at in class – indeed, the researchers highlight the importance on this messaging early on in the class:
As the success of active learning crucially depends on student motivation and engagement, it is of paramount importance that students appreciate, early in the semester, the benefits of struggling with the material during active learning. If students are misled by their inherent response into thinking that they are not learning, they will not be able to self-regulate, and they will not learn as successfully. In addition, during group work, poor attitudes or low engagement of a few students can have negative effects on other students in their groups. Thus, although students may eventually, on their own, discover the value of active learning during a semester-long course, their learning will be impaired during the first part of the course while they still feel the inherent disfluency associated with in-class activities. We recommend that instructors intervene early on by explicitly presenting the value of increased cognitive efforts associated with active learning. Instructors should also give an examination (or other assessment) as early as possible so students can gauge their actual learning. These strategies can help students get on board with active learning as quickly as possible. Then, throughout the semester, instructors should adopt research-based explanation and facilitation strategies (26), should encourage students to work hard during activities, and should remind them of the value of increased cognitive effort. Instructors should also solicit frequent feedback such as “one-minute papers” throughout the course (43) and respond to students’ concerns. The success of active learning will be greatly enhanced if students accept that it leads to deeper learning—and acknowledge that it may sometimes feel like exactly the opposite is true.
(Deslauriers et al. at 19255-6)
(b) It is important to enlighten colleagues about why we’re negatively evaluated by students for the things we do correctly. (And how the realizations and post-bar passage plaudits from our students to that effect come too late to save some of us from the “stink” of negative evaluations.) So add that to the growing body of literature that is critical to the current method of faculty evaluations.
(c) It’s also a moment for us to re-assert our expertise as the learning experts on campus, specifically with regard to how entering law students were used to experiencing and assessing their learning in undergrad, right before they got to us.
(3) For the empiricists in the room – a great study to replicate in legal education."
