For me the most interesting learning experience was studying physics through “magic”. That’s why I think videos like “what if earth was donut-shaped” are the best. You aren’t just told that gravity is mg or whatever, it makes you think of consequences, of all different variations. It’s the opposite of “perfect spheres in a vacuum” that doesn’t actually behave how we see it. It’s effing galaxy brain 🌌 🧠
What surprised me, was how you explained, that asking the question before giving the answer helps with learning, because that's exactly what happened to me a week ago. Our teacher asked, why objects expand when heated up and I gave my answer, which was wrong but when I got the actual answer I was even more excited to write it down and remember it. Today I could even answer a question related to it to a friend, so that felt like a great learning experience.
What stood out to me most was the fact of how making predictions improves the learning. When I was young, whenever a teacher asked what we thought might happen if..., I just thought it was a useless introduction to the real learning, you know, don't tell me what you're GOING to say, just SAY it!!! Now I know the wisdom of it. For me, and this may not be shared by many people, I really needed to know the why of things in active learning, basically the metacognition of it, even long before I knew the term. To me so much of my childhood and life in school was just doing what I was told, following orders. It reminds me of Planet of the Apes where the apes were told "DO!" That's what I felt like much of the time. I didn't know why I was doing what I was told to do. It would have helped me if, from time to time, I was told the why. This is why we're organizing the material this way. This is why we're comparing and contrasting these items. This is why we're taking a test on this (not just for a grade or to see whether you're smart or stupid). I don't think I would have felt like I did for much of the time, just a sheep or cow being herded through the stalls to the invariable slaughter house of adulthood.
As a high school teacher looking to improve pupil performance, the idea I found most surprising is how poorly our 1 hour, single objective lessons fit the ideas that you've outlined here. I'm now planning on designing lessons differently, in blocks, where each each lesson is split in to 2-3 sessions allowing students to observe and organize new concepts, compare and contrast concepts previously introduced and finally, evaluate and predict concepts that were introduced a few lessons ago. I used to think that getting pupils to take their own notes and convert into mind maps was a good form of active learning, as it required students to think about converting large amounts of text in to smaller, shaper descriptions. However, this is only 1 of the 3 requirements you have outlined, and so mindmaps need to be used as part of a wider learning experience. Really enjoying your channel, your content is really making me think about how I structure and teach my lessons. Subscribed & liked.
I'm not at all knowledgeable in the subject, but I just wanted to say, as someone who didn't have learning experiences like the ones you're trying to create, your students are lucky. Teachers with an enthusiasm like yours are rare, and your students will appreciate you a lot (even if they don't think so today lol).
As a physics teacher who have received extensive trainings about pedagogy, I can say that active learning is misunderstood sometimes. We are mainly encouraged to focus on "activities and games". However, I think effective active learning is more about cognitive processes and not physical ones. Thank you for this great video.
Surprise: Thinking back on effective classes how much they relied on students generating hypotheses before the real information was revealed to them Bad Experience: Group activities in which the solution can be gained by means other than deep understanding of the topic, or projects for which much of the grading was about something other than understanding of the topic (like aesthetics)
1 what is the thing that most surprised you about this video? I think it was the geology example, because I just wasn't expecting for that (and it was very creative) 2 give an example of a bad active learning experience or a good active learning experience and explain why you think it was good or bad? I remember a class that i had in the 9th grade, and the teacher asked us to form groups and we played a game were the first group to raise their hands answered and if they answer right they get a point, i think it was fun but i don't remember the specific topic of that class so because of that i think it was a bad attempt at active learning
1 Nothing surprising because I have watched videos and read books on active learning for years. Did help me organise the different types better in my head, though. 2 My geography teacher was the most boring human being that ever existed. I'll put folding money on that outcome. There was only one textbook in the room and he held it. He would write the chapter on the board and we had to write it into our jotters. To stay awake I learned to connect my eyes directly to the hand holding the pencil so that I could spend the time planning to build a submarine. No idea how I scraped pass in Geography O level
I am still relatively new to the science of learning and have only been sifting through videos from you and Justin Sung and applying free recall to remember and understand the principles you two teach. The newest thing I learned from this video might have seemed obvious to others, but the example with the two types of lectures (info dump vs. combined with student-instructor interactions) made passive vs. active learning make sense, or at the very least stick to my brain more significantly (I'm sure I have heard about passive learning somewhere, but now I can explain it a little more confidently). This set a solid foundation for understanding the rest of the video as well as connect it to your other recent video about how we can use free recall to learn more from UA-cam videos. Think about it: me watching this video would have been passive learning if it weren't for me writing this comment.
From this video i've learnt that Organized structures requires making connections, relationships among ideas/info we learn; Recall and apply requires having comparison among ideas. So making connections, comparisons is higher level of learning in Bloom's taxonomy. I used to learn SQL- a query language for data by learning code casually along with tutorials, that's why i forgot it quickly and had to study once again, now i thought I should apply right learning method to learn it and store it in long-term memory.
I have subscribed to your channel, Dr Benjamin. The thing that surprised me the most is to learn about active learning in a systematic way. For the first time I've known how passive and active learning are so different. Also this video works as a reminder. I should be more active in my learning and tell others to do the same.
For me, the thing that I was most fascinated by was what you described to be the two ways students have to reason in the 4th class -- which fit nicely into my background knowledge of analytic philosophy: Jonanthan Schaffer talks about how most, if not all things take a three-part structure of basis, link, result (you can learn more in his lecture on UA-cam, "Beyond Fundamentality"). What students seem to be learning when they're reasoning "both ways" is what's called a determination relation (reasoning from geological forces to the resulting rock formations) and an explanation relation (reasoning from the rocks to what forces are necessary preconditions for them existing). Both determination and explanation relations go into defining something comprehensively, so when students understand each component well, they'll understand the learning material exceptionally well. This is because they're literally acquiring (in a high-quality manner) all the essential semantic information about what a given thing actually is.
What surprised me was the bird part, but not in a way like it came up from nowhere or I didn't know this. More like, "Wow, this is what I've been waiting for." I'm 100% sure that organizing stuff is going to help me because I always try to learn a bunch of information about one topic and don't even know if they are related or not. A bad active experience of mine is, as I mentioned before, I am trying to get a bunch of stuff that is not organized. And I don't tend to do recall activities. And for a good active learning experience, I'd say it just happened now while watching your video. I tried to predict the rock example for students, and yeah, I was wrong, but it has made me more focused on your answer about the rocks.
I think two metrics that aren't getting measured are: 1. Time-taken to (try to remember/rewatch study material) 2. How much effort (thinking power) is needed. I would assume 'trying to remember' would exert more effort. And I don't think people need to exert this effort on any study material, and only for the most important ones.
For me the hardest part to implement is recall because I think that I got used to rely too much on intuition and also think that returning to one subject is like redoing the work. Sure those are tricks from the brain, but I think I can come up with something from this video that will really help me learning, by trying to structurize my subject, recall it and apply it.
I was surprised by the three categories. In my mind, I have been separating it into the organization (or more like encoding) and retrieval. I was categorizing “practice” as a sub-category under retrieval. I’d be interested to learn a bit more about the distinction.
What surprised me is that you pointed to the interaction between the lecturer and the student as an example of active learning because it's something I've been doing for a long time, and I didn't know it was a form of active learning. A set of good experiences I've had with active learning is my academic success in highschool. I think a good amount of my understanding has come from asking questions in class and prying the teachers for answers.
The organization part it's really key for me because that's the missing piece i was lacking to grasp. A bad experience with active learning was trying to understand a subject i didn't understand very well, why i didn't understand very well that subject, easy because i didn't understand the importance of the subject in the big picture, this happen to me in programming. In that time i didn't understand the specific of the subject and that make more confused. A good experience with active learning was when i was learning math, i organized the subject in that time, then i focus in learn the basic from certain problems, after that i ended being better a math just because i organized the theme and understand the basics from the problem.
Thanks for sharing! Yeah, sometimes I feel like teachers rush to use some kind of "active learning" technique because it accords with their philosophy about learning, without focusing student attention so they don't get confused. Structure and organization is critical!
Surprise: How much value was assigned to the 'pre-learning/activate prior knowledge' kind of stuff. That's always been the first cut for me when I'm short on time. (Unless it's built on things we've learned previously.) Bad active learning experience: classes where we get put into groups, handed discussion questions we know nothing about, spend 40 minutes bloviating in our ignorance, and then the teacher gives a quick 10 minute presentation of the actual relevant knowledge that could've let us have a semi-informed discussion, and that's the end of class.
I was surprised at how useful forming an opinion, before finding out the answer, was in helping you learn. It makes sense though. I was also surprised that word searches were not useful! Thank you for the definition of what an expert was. That makes a lot of sense.
Very helpful video! The thing that jumped out at me most was that it's okay to form some hierarchical mental organizational structures (or at least partially so). I must have been unconsciously overcorrecting after hearing Justin Sung say that when building mental models, you want to have lateral connections in there from the start and not add them later. I realize now upon reflection that even his example diagrams had a bit of hierarchy scattered within them since sometimes information just has to be structured that way. Thanks for helping me realize I was being too rigid there! I'm really glad I found both of your channels in the last couple of days.
What I learnt from this video was that a good active learning strategy requires you to organize knowledge recall and apply knowledge practice what you've learnt
I can't think of a specific bad experience that I have had, but I will say that I was the type to re-read, highlight, and jot down notes and never review either the stuff I highlighted or the notes that I took.
One thing that surprised me was how similar the example of children learning about rocks was to the overall structure of my A level exams. It does seem like Cambridge wants us to, ofcourse, apply a variety of different techniques. I'd say one good active learning experience would be being asked to leverage knowledge I've been introduced to in a completely different scenario, like, I know the button inputs on my xbox controller, but I've got to use them in a variety of different games. It's all the same buttons, but I modulate them differently, and they're cemented in my mind now. A bad active learning experience, I'd say, would be trying to memorise each specific portion of a bit of text so I can ultra-memorise it, rather than getting the big picture understanding to make it easier to connect to other topics and broaden my knowledge.
Surprise: tests as an example of active learning. I think the method used to study can be active or passive but mostly they are used as ways to assess in that moment whether the student learned what the teacher wanted them to. (I'm a university lecturer, and I test frequently and quiz frequently because the research shows frequency of testing helps with learning, but my understanding is because that's about reinforcing the recall. A test in and of itself hasn't struck me as active learning). Good example: took Russian language classes decades ago. We sat at tables arranged in a U. The professor started every class by going in the center of the U and then spinning in place, pointing at people and asking questions. In Russian. The amount of energy and adrenaline and intensity this created in a 7:30am class... Insane.
To me the ways you described in the video fit very well to blooms taxonomy way of thinking about memory, with actual applications in the real world. Where the practice correlates to apply level, free recall sounds like the analyze level, and making predictions I think matches the evaluate level. Not really sure on what level organize fits, but it is similar to a mindmap
For me it was organising. I did know how to organise but didnt think it would be an active recall(through i was expecting to see interleaving but i didnt saw it which also is surprise but you did mention it just that it doesnt have much focus)
"they´re not rocks they are minerals" subbed, i hope that channel grows some problems in my study - i see a topic that im unfamiliar with, most information have a neutral value for me - in the test it turns out that the info i skipped actually was important (like a picture annotation or some half sentence)
Thanks for the support! It can be tough to know what's important. It's also tough to know what will be tested. In some cases, you might know equally important things, but they just happened to not be tested on.
I was interested in the FREE RECALL active learning method that was implemented by the researchers. Comparing it to the "study-repeat" method which was revealed to be a worse learning method. An example of a bad active learning experience is the implementation of games that does not affect the overall learning of the students. These supposedly active learning games are just a waste of time because there is no true learning occurring. In contrast, a good active learning experience for me is going through the three phases of AL because it really immerses your whole focus and attention to the lesson. It gives a sense of importance because of the "recall, application. and practice" part, not reducing the actual knowledge to a boring uninteresting thing which was constantly being done by terrible teachers.
I don’t know wether my style was active learning or not but when I try to remember I guess it was active learning I always asked questions as much as I can try to think scenarios even ahead what my teacher will teach me but still at that time I don’t know the true essence of learning yeh my grades were great I always got second rank in my class but still there was something missing for long time in my learning that is recalling because I used to thought recalling = cramming means you don’t really learnt something but after knowing that recalling from memory what you have learned is true knowledge I guess
For me, I was aware of active learning, in general, but I didn't know the needed parts: organize knowledge, recall and apply, and practice. I hope you do more videos on the specifics and how they work in different subjects or as an overall strategy for teaching. One lesson that I remember taking part in started with a questionaire that asked us to write False or True to central ideas of the lesson and if False, to change it to make it True. We went over the answers and argued them out (without the teacher) and changed our answers, if we wanted to. The lesson was taught and then we revisited our questionaire answers and discussed the correct answers. Other activities followed this to further our understanding of the central ideas. What do you think about the use of Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge and where would it fit into active learning's three steps? Thank you for your videos.
_1. What surprised you the most about this video?_ A: I guess the contrast of the effectiveness of different strategies *within* active learning (from that word search example lol). I guess I knew somewhat that even within effective techniques some would be much more effective than others, but I had never thought about how some are active enough to just *barely* cross line of effectiveness. From now on I guess I'm gonna think more about how my study techniques active the right kind of cognitive processes, and not just some cognitive process. And I guess realizing this also made the "you have to study/organize information in a way that matches how you're gonna be tested" thing "click" for me. _2. Give an example of good or bad active learning experience, and elaborate on why it's good or bad._ A: My high school history, at the beginning of every class, used to ask some randomly selected students to summarize the previous lesson, and sometimes (if the summary was incomplete or if he felt like pushing us) he would even ask some questions of his own eg, you say X is the case, why is that? Or sometimes even trick questions, eg you say something, and then he stops and says "oh, really? Are you sure?" Or sometimes would even ask another classmate whether or not he agreed with you and why. He would do this in a fun way that we all enjoyed, and the few times he didn't do this were very disappointing as we had all eagerly prepared to be tested. He would also compliment/encourage us when we got something right. Specially if it was a low achieving student who outdid themselves in their summary. And he would also comment something on the test (his tests usually consisted of a few short answer questions to explain an event, or a movement or something, and almost always a question to interpret a passage from a book (which was completely unrelated to anything learned, but he wanted to encourage us to pick up reading, and specifically read more national authors/about our own culture)). He commented stuff like "Humm, well done grasshopper" (his nickname for us, although it doesn't have the same connotation in English). "Ah, is that so? Lol" When you really stretched things in your interpretation. *But anyway, I think this is good way to implement active learning as it* at the very least force us to recall information if you're asked direct questions. But if you were told to synthesize a lesson, it would force you to make sense of it/organize it in your head before you could put it in words, so would be even better. But another way in which he could turn this into an even higher yield activity (this would be implementing level 4 of Bloom's Taxonomy, I think) would be to instead of just asking direct fact-recall questions, ask to elaborate on how 2 things were related, ask us to explain the chain of events that lead to a certain thing, etc. This would force us to look at all the isolated facts and try to understand how they relate to each other. Especially if these were things that weren't explicitly said and you had to conclude on your own. For some this might sound like nothing, but given the state of education in my country a teacher (and the learning experience he provides) like this is so rare. And his enthusiasm for teaching is unmatched. Amd the reading thing, he would sometimes would ask for silence during class, and start reciting some passage, or telling us a story from a book and then stop midway. We would always ask him to go on, but he refused, as he was trying to edge us so we'd read the book ourselves. Again, this type of thing is unmatched. I would safely bet my right hand that 95% of the population in my country has never read a book outside of an academic setting (and even within, you usually don't at least for high school and below). Having a teacher that showed us why we would *want* to read (as opposed to telling us why we should, why the youth should be informed, etc like other people (who by the way were hipocrates themselves lol)) is invaluable (even though no one usually did seek the book afterwards lol).
Am a maths teacher trying to teach my learners how to find simple interest and compound interest on investments. Most of my learners have fundamental gaps in understanding like most of my learners are unable to divide and multiply numbers, so most of my learners are able to make maths substitutions into formulas but get stuck when it comes to multiplying and dividing. How can I help my learners? Their ages range from (11 to 13)
It's been really hard to change my old ways of studying. I still fall in the same habit of just memorizing information instead of asking myself if I really understood it. I want to test myself more and gain more knowledge at the course of this semester
its was goood experience to learn and for my surprise that I was actually doing passive learning thinking that I'm learning actively, the variations between both are so much differ in levels and I consider this as a bad experience in my life but I learned a lot and learning. by the way, thank you Benjamin for your videos and entertainment and love your voice bro...
I was suprised to find out that word search is not effective. In my head, it was this persona that every learning that requires intense cognitive load is better.
This is similar to how we have to learn languages in real life. We hear sounds and try to make predictions of what they could be, eventually we are taught them, and try to frequently recall them. So looks like humans actually naturally do active learning :)
On that organizing knowledge part (4.15) Do you mean the *process* of organizing study topic is active learning? In other words you look at content you are studying and construct the mind map where you separate substance A, B and C, yes? If not then what? Also Wow After all these years I realized that my high school math/physics teacher was damn good teacher because I still remember where do lightings come from it does not come from sky it comes from land. Sure that wasn't really relevant for physics 101 but still I still remember it all from those years ago.
i) i noticed with keen interest how practical coherent book shelves seem ii) a spontaneous group work with neither clear tasks nor time frame i found rather futile, reminding me of your statistic teacher's approach
Hear hear on the poorly framed group work! One of my pet peeves, too. Maybe I find it doubly annoying b/c I think group work can be done really well, but often... isn't.
Is this correct? Passive learning is reading or watching done in order to acquire knowledge. Active learning is practicing retrieval and application of knowledge done in order to deepen understanding and to increase long term memory. But active learning cannot be done without first engaging in some passive learning--otherwise one has no knowledge to retrieve. It's not that one is better than the other, but that one needs to go beyond just passive learning.
I don't think so. You might watch this video (ua-cam.com/video/b5pRoCM7PII/v-deo.html) for more on active learning. Active learning and passive learning are really terms that refer to teaching approaches - and one is, indeed, better than the other, at least when you're talking about average effects. This might seem like a semantic issue, but it's helpful to be consistent about how we use these terms. What you're talking about is closer to the difference between encoding and retrieval. But encoding isn't necessarily "passive" in the way you're talking about either. Consider the generation effect, where people who generate target words (e.g., "b_n_n_") remember them better than people who simply read them (e.g., "orange"). You might call generation (and various other beneficial encoding methods) "active". Certainly they often involve more active cognitive effort than simply reading. But you can also read in an active way. More on this in an upcoming video. Sorry if this comment is a bit confusing. Hopefully I can clear this up more in the future.
@@benjaminkeep Yes, I was incorrectly synonymizing active learning with retrieval. From what I've been reading, active learning is the creation of knowledge (an explanation) of a concept by observing and searching for information, in contrast to passive learning which is being provided the explanation of the concept up front. Retrieval, then, would be a form of active processing. I think your linked video cleared it up nicely.
I didn't know that all those techniques were active learning. A bad experience with active learning is that I DON'T KNOW HOW TO ORGANIZE MY KNOWLEDGE, for example I try to do mind maps while studying history to make connections with each other and engage my brain more but I just can't organize the mind maps or write only the important things and not copy the whole textbook because I'm afraid that when I come revise it and some of the things that should just come to my mind automatically seeing the map just won't come. At the end I just revise from the book because the mind map was confusing. Or the fact that it takes too much of my time. The good experience was when I realized that unknowingly I was applying active learning in maths because I never studied it but applied everything explained by the teacher in problems and even if it was hard at first but little by little it imprinted itself in my mind and it became just a piece of cake. Sorry I sort of ranted all my frustrations :)
Thanks for these examples! I'm planning on exploring more when things like concept mapping or mind mapping work well and when they don't. I know that Justin Sung has a couple of videos on the topic. But want to dive into the research myself.
Hi Benjamin, can you do a video on if memory training can improve the performance of being able to retain/decipher new information. Experts like Nelson Dellis, Alex Mullen come to mind?
Heyy, I've been looking for content on "The Right kind of Practice" Which of your videos might you recommend for the above? :o Basically, I really want to focus on performance and procedural memory, or at higher-order thinking skills that help improve performance, especially in the long-run.
Honestly, I'm not sure I have exactly what you're looking for, but here are some: Practice More Efficiently | Deliberate Practice - ua-cam.com/video/aIPS4ugcanM/v-deo.html Secrets of Interleaved Practice - ua-cam.com/video/AWTYfzxBwPg/v-deo.html What people get wrong about deliberate practice - ua-cam.com/video/WbUOY9ioIqw/v-deo.html What no one tells you about learning faster - ua-cam.com/video/wRb32j6_pD4/v-deo.html Learning beyond facts - ua-cam.com/video/7YtC24QnikY/v-deo.html
Hi again! That's a good question. The literature on active learning has mostly focused on academic subjects at the college or adult level (because that is where teachers tend to use lectures the most). And a lot of the typical active learning techniques tend to focus on information or concepts (like free recall, elaboration, worked examples, etc.). With playing sports or an instrument, it's more generally accepted that you're going to have to practice. You can't just watch other people perform and expect to get good (though closely observing someone play a sport or an instrument can be valuable). For these kinds of well-defined skills, conversations tend to focus on how to structure the practice or training regimen (e.g., interleaved practice, deliberate practice, forms of feedback, what to focus on during play, etc.) Partly, it's a question of what specific education communities need. The active/passive distinction makes some sense when talking about a college class: lectures are still the dominant form of learning on college campuses, although things are changing. The distinction is less important when talking about playing instruments or sports - active learning still "works" in those domains, but most teachers and students do some form of active learning, so the next question is how to structure that well.
What is the difference between apply and practice and how are the stages different for conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge? I would assume for procedural knowledge practice would be more important than in conceptual knowledge.
Good question - I wouldn't put a lot of weight on the difference. In some subjects, they can mean the same thing (for instance, solving math problems). But in other cases - like the example I talk about with the geology teacher - they might be applying their knowledge to sort rock samples, but "doing geology" (as a professional geologist) is considerably more involved than this. I don't know that a professor would call my example activity "practicing geology". I agree that practice is more heavily used in contexts where there's a well-defined skill involved and it's easy to see what that skill is (e.g., playing games like chess, solving math problems, riding a bike). Most subjects or areas involve a mixture of procedural and conceptual knowledge. They support each other. Practice can helpfully develop both - often, concepts are clarified through application and practice. But there are a lot of physical skills that involve comparatively very little conceptual knowledge (like riding a bike, using a spoon, etc.).
2:55 Had teacherS like this and was bizarre af, i felt unconfortable fearing it would fuck me up later but there wasnt much i could do and i wasnt sadistic enough to ask for more shitty classes, luckly nothing bad happened.
1) Nothing in particular surprised me, I'm a few dozens of meters in my deep dive into this field/topic lolol 2) My best active learning experience was when in Japan, I was surrounded by the language and it was getting into my brain in a much more active way, since I was interracting with it and it's not like I could ignore it lol
1:30 Which curiously mean that even IF IM THE ONE READING it's still passive!!!?? And thats why you should stop reflect, make questions, hypothesize, like im blatantly doing now and you did in your queen history video. Or simply thinking again and again just that damn trauma.
Hahaha how many confused messages do you get from machine learning people? 😂 For those who are not familiar, active learning is a sub discipline of machine learning too.
For me the most interesting learning experience was studying physics through “magic”. That’s why I think videos like “what if earth was donut-shaped” are the best. You aren’t just told that gravity is mg or whatever, it makes you think of consequences, of all different variations. It’s the opposite of “perfect spheres in a vacuum” that doesn’t actually behave how we see it. It’s effing galaxy brain 🌌 🧠
What surprised me, was how you explained, that asking the question before giving the answer helps with learning, because that's exactly what happened to me a week ago.
Our teacher asked, why objects expand when heated up and I gave my answer, which was wrong but when I got the actual answer I was even more excited to write it down and remember it. Today I could even answer a question related to it to a friend, so that felt like a great learning experience.
What stood out to me most was the fact of how making predictions improves the learning. When I was young, whenever a teacher asked what we thought might happen if..., I just thought it was a useless introduction to the real learning, you know, don't tell me what you're GOING to say, just SAY it!!! Now I know the wisdom of it.
For me, and this may not be shared by many people, I really needed to know the why of things in active learning, basically the metacognition of it, even long before I knew the term. To me so much of my childhood and life in school was just doing what I was told, following orders. It reminds me of Planet of the Apes where the apes were told "DO!" That's what I felt like much of the time. I didn't know why I was doing what I was told to do. It would have helped me if, from time to time, I was told the why. This is why we're organizing the material this way. This is why we're comparing and contrasting these items. This is why we're taking a test on this (not just for a grade or to see whether you're smart or stupid). I don't think I would have felt like I did for much of the time, just a sheep or cow being herded through the stalls to the invariable slaughter house of adulthood.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
I agree that explicitness about the purposes of the lesson goes a long way.
As a high school teacher looking to improve pupil performance, the idea I found most surprising is how poorly our 1 hour, single objective lessons fit the ideas that you've outlined here. I'm now planning on designing lessons differently, in blocks, where each each lesson is split in to 2-3 sessions allowing students to observe and organize new concepts, compare and contrast concepts previously introduced and finally, evaluate and predict concepts that were introduced a few lessons ago.
I used to think that getting pupils to take their own notes and convert into mind maps was a good form of active learning, as it required students to think about converting large amounts of text in to smaller, shaper descriptions. However, this is only 1 of the 3 requirements you have outlined, and so mindmaps need to be used as part of a wider learning experience.
Really enjoying your channel, your content is really making me think about how I structure and teach my lessons.
Subscribed & liked.
Great to have you here - good luck with the new approach!
I'm not at all knowledgeable in the subject, but I just wanted to say, as someone who didn't have learning experiences like the ones you're trying to create, your students are lucky.
Teachers with an enthusiasm like yours are rare, and your students will appreciate you a lot (even if they don't think so today lol).
As a physics teacher who have received extensive trainings about pedagogy, I can say that active learning is misunderstood sometimes. We are mainly encouraged to focus on "activities and games". However, I think effective active learning is more about cognitive processes and not physical ones.
Thank you for this great video.
Surprise: Thinking back on effective classes how much they relied on students generating hypotheses before the real information was revealed to them
Bad Experience: Group activities in which the solution can be gained by means other than deep understanding of the topic, or projects for which much of the grading was about something other than understanding of the topic (like aesthetics)
1 what is the thing that most surprised you about this video?
I think it was the geology example, because I just wasn't expecting for that (and it was very creative)
2 give an example of a bad active learning experience or a good active learning experience and explain why you think it was good or bad?
I remember a class that i had in the 9th grade, and the teacher asked us to form groups and we played a game were the first group to raise their hands answered and if they answer right they get a point, i think it was fun but i don't remember the specific topic of that class so because of that i think it was a bad attempt at active learning
1 Nothing surprising because I have watched videos and read books on active learning for years. Did help me organise the different types better in my head, though.
2 My geography teacher was the most boring human being that ever existed. I'll put folding money on that outcome. There was only one textbook in the room and he held it. He would write the chapter on the board and we had to write it into our jotters. To stay awake I learned to connect my eyes directly to the hand holding the pencil so that I could spend the time planning to build a submarine. No idea how I scraped pass in Geography O level
I am still relatively new to the science of learning and have only been sifting through videos from you and Justin Sung and applying free recall to remember and understand the principles you two teach. The newest thing I learned from this video might have seemed obvious to others, but the example with the two types of lectures (info dump vs. combined with student-instructor interactions) made passive vs. active learning make sense, or at the very least stick to my brain more significantly (I'm sure I have heard about passive learning somewhere, but now I can explain it a little more confidently). This set a solid foundation for understanding the rest of the video as well as connect it to your other recent video about how we can use free recall to learn more from UA-cam videos. Think about it: me watching this video would have been passive learning if it weren't for me writing this comment.
4:49- 4:57: My Anha!! Moment ❤
From this video i've learnt that Organized structures requires making connections, relationships among ideas/info we learn; Recall and apply requires having comparison among ideas. So making connections, comparisons is higher level of learning in Bloom's taxonomy. I used to learn SQL- a query language for data by learning code casually along with tutorials, that's why i forgot it quickly and had to study once again, now i thought I should apply right learning method to learn it and store it in long-term memory.
I have subscribed to your channel, Dr Benjamin. The thing that surprised me the most is to learn about active learning in a systematic way. For the first time I've known how passive and active learning are so different. Also this video works as a reminder. I should be more active in my learning and tell others to do the same.
For me, the thing that I was most fascinated by was what you described to be the two ways students have to reason in the 4th class -- which fit nicely into my background knowledge of analytic philosophy:
Jonanthan Schaffer talks about how most, if not all things take a three-part structure of basis, link, result (you can learn more in his lecture on UA-cam, "Beyond Fundamentality"). What students seem to be learning when they're reasoning "both ways" is what's called a determination relation (reasoning from geological forces to the resulting rock formations) and an explanation relation (reasoning from the rocks to what forces are necessary preconditions for them existing).
Both determination and explanation relations go into defining something comprehensively, so when students understand each component well, they'll understand the learning material exceptionally well. This is because they're literally acquiring (in a high-quality manner) all the essential semantic information about what a given thing actually is.
That's a really interesting way of putting it. Thanks for the comment and the suggested video!
What surprised me was the bird part, but not in a way like it came up from nowhere or I didn't know this. More like, "Wow, this is what I've been waiting for." I'm 100% sure that organizing stuff is going to help me because I always try to learn a bunch of information about one topic and don't even know if they are related or not.
A bad active experience of mine is, as I mentioned before, I am trying to get a bunch of stuff that is not organized. And I don't tend to do recall activities.
And for a good active learning experience, I'd say it just happened now while watching your video. I tried to predict the rock example for students, and yeah, I was wrong, but it has made me more focused on your answer about the rocks.
I realized you applied the three types of active learning in your video on how to study for finals.
I think two metrics that aren't getting measured are:
1. Time-taken to (try to remember/rewatch study material)
2. How much effort (thinking power) is needed.
I would assume 'trying to remember' would exert more effort. And I don't think people need to exert this effort on any study material, and only for the most important ones.
For me the hardest part to implement is recall because I think that I got used to rely too much on intuition and also think that returning to one subject is like redoing the work. Sure those are tricks from the brain, but I think I can come up with something from this video that will really help me learning, by trying to structurize my subject, recall it and apply it.
I was surprised by the three categories. In my mind, I have been separating it into the organization (or more like encoding) and retrieval. I was categorizing “practice” as a sub-category under retrieval. I’d be interested to learn a bit more about the distinction.
What surprised me is that you pointed to the interaction between the lecturer and the student as an example of active learning because it's something I've been doing for a long time, and I didn't know it was a form of active learning.
A set of good experiences I've had with active learning is my academic success in highschool. I think a good amount of my understanding has come from asking questions in class and prying the teachers for answers.
Same for me
The organization part it's really key for me because that's the missing piece i was lacking to grasp. A bad experience with active learning was trying to understand a subject i didn't understand very well, why i didn't understand very well that subject, easy because i didn't understand the importance of the subject in the big picture, this happen to me in programming. In that time i didn't understand the specific of the subject and that make more confused. A good experience with active learning was when i was learning math, i organized the subject in that time, then i focus in learn the basic from certain problems, after that i ended being better a math just because i organized the theme and understand the basics from the problem.
Thanks for sharing! Yeah, sometimes I feel like teachers rush to use some kind of "active learning" technique because it accords with their philosophy about learning, without focusing student attention so they don't get confused. Structure and organization is critical!
Surprise: How much value was assigned to the 'pre-learning/activate prior knowledge' kind of stuff. That's always been the first cut for me when I'm short on time. (Unless it's built on things we've learned previously.)
Bad active learning experience: classes where we get put into groups, handed discussion questions we know nothing about, spend 40 minutes bloviating in our ignorance, and then the teacher gives a quick 10 minute presentation of the actual relevant knowledge that could've let us have a semi-informed discussion, and that's the end of class.
I was surprised at how useful forming an opinion, before finding out the answer, was in helping you learn. It makes sense though. I was also surprised that word searches were not useful! Thank you for the definition of what an expert was. That makes a lot of sense.
Very helpful video! The thing that jumped out at me most was that it's okay to form some hierarchical mental organizational structures (or at least partially so). I must have been unconsciously overcorrecting after hearing Justin Sung say that when building mental models, you want to have lateral connections in there from the start and not add them later. I realize now upon reflection that even his example diagrams had a bit of hierarchy scattered within them since sometimes information just has to be structured that way. Thanks for helping me realize I was being too rigid there! I'm really glad I found both of your channels in the last couple of days.
What I learnt from this video was that a good active learning strategy requires you to
organize knowledge
recall and apply knowledge
practice what you've learnt
I can't think of a specific bad experience that I have had, but I will say that I was the type to re-read, highlight, and jot down notes and never review either the stuff I highlighted or the notes that I took.
One thing that surprised me was how similar the example of children learning about rocks was to the overall structure of my A level exams. It does seem like Cambridge wants us to, ofcourse, apply a variety of different techniques.
I'd say one good active learning experience would be being asked to leverage knowledge I've been introduced to in a completely different scenario, like, I know the button inputs on my xbox controller, but I've got to use them in a variety of different games. It's all the same buttons, but I modulate them differently, and they're cemented in my mind now.
A bad active learning experience, I'd say, would be trying to memorise each specific portion of a bit of text so I can ultra-memorise it, rather than getting the big picture understanding to make it easier to connect to other topics and broaden my knowledge.
Surprise: tests as an example of active learning. I think the method used to study can be active or passive but mostly they are used as ways to assess in that moment whether the student learned what the teacher wanted them to. (I'm a university lecturer, and I test frequently and quiz frequently because the research shows frequency of testing helps with learning, but my understanding is because that's about reinforcing the recall. A test in and of itself hasn't struck me as active learning).
Good example: took Russian language classes decades ago. We sat at tables arranged in a U. The professor started every class by going in the center of the U and then spinning in place, pointing at people and asking questions. In Russian. The amount of energy and adrenaline and intensity this created in a 7:30am class... Insane.
That Russian class sounds great!
To me the ways you described in the video fit very well to blooms taxonomy way of thinking about memory, with actual applications in the real world. Where the practice correlates to apply level, free recall sounds like the analyze level, and making predictions I think matches the evaluate level. Not really sure on what level organize fits, but it is similar to a mindmap
For me it was organising. I did know how to organise but didnt think it would be an active recall(through i was expecting to see interleaving but i didnt saw it which also is surprise but you did mention it just that it doesnt have much focus)
"they´re not rocks they are minerals"
subbed, i hope that channel grows
some problems in my study - i see a topic that im unfamiliar with, most information have a neutral value for me - in the test it turns out that the info i skipped actually was important (like a picture annotation or some half sentence)
Thanks for the support!
It can be tough to know what's important. It's also tough to know what will be tested. In some cases, you might know equally important things, but they just happened to not be tested on.
I was interested in the FREE RECALL active learning method that was implemented by the researchers. Comparing it to the "study-repeat" method which was revealed to be a worse learning method.
An example of a bad active learning experience is the implementation of games that does not affect the overall learning of the students. These supposedly active learning games are just a waste of time because there is no true learning occurring. In contrast, a good active learning experience for me is going through the three phases of AL because it really immerses your whole focus and attention to the lesson. It gives a sense of importance because of the "recall, application. and practice" part, not reducing the actual knowledge to a boring uninteresting thing which was constantly being done by terrible teachers.
I don’t know wether my style was active learning or not but when I try to remember I guess it was active learning I always asked questions as much as I can try to think scenarios even ahead what my teacher will teach me but still at that time I don’t know the true essence of learning yeh my grades were great I always got second rank in my class but still there was something missing for long time in my learning that is recalling because I used to thought recalling = cramming means you don’t really learnt something but after knowing that recalling from memory what you have learned is true knowledge I guess
For me, I was aware of active learning, in general, but I didn't know the needed parts: organize knowledge, recall and apply, and practice. I hope you do more videos on the specifics and how they work in different subjects or as an overall strategy for teaching.
One lesson that I remember taking part in started with a questionaire that asked us to write False or True to central ideas of the lesson and if False, to change it to make it True. We went over the answers and argued them out (without the teacher) and changed our answers, if we wanted to. The lesson was taught and then we revisited our questionaire answers and discussed the correct answers. Other activities followed this to further our understanding of the central ideas. What do you think about the use of Bloom's Taxonomy and Webb's Depth of Knowledge and where would it fit into active learning's three steps? Thank you for your videos.
_1. What surprised you the most about this video?_
A: I guess the contrast of the effectiveness of different strategies *within* active learning (from that word search example lol).
I guess I knew somewhat that even within effective techniques some would be much more effective than others, but I had never thought about how some are active enough to just *barely* cross line of effectiveness.
From now on I guess I'm gonna think more about how my study techniques active the right kind of cognitive processes, and not just some cognitive process.
And I guess realizing this also made the "you have to study/organize information in a way that matches how you're gonna be tested" thing "click" for me.
_2. Give an example of good or bad active learning experience, and elaborate on why it's good or bad._
A: My high school history, at the beginning of every class, used to ask some randomly selected students to summarize the previous lesson, and sometimes (if the summary was incomplete or if he felt like pushing us) he would even ask some questions of his own eg, you say X is the case, why is that? Or sometimes even trick questions, eg you say something, and then he stops and says "oh, really? Are you sure?" Or sometimes would even ask another classmate whether or not he agreed with you and why.
He would do this in a fun way that we all enjoyed, and the few times he didn't do this were very disappointing as we had all eagerly prepared to be tested.
He would also compliment/encourage us when we got something right. Specially if it was a low achieving student who outdid themselves in their summary. And he would also comment something on the test (his tests usually consisted of a few short answer questions to explain an event, or a movement or something, and almost always a question to interpret a passage from a book (which was completely unrelated to anything learned, but he wanted to encourage us to pick up reading, and specifically read more national authors/about our own culture)). He commented stuff like "Humm, well done grasshopper" (his nickname for us, although it doesn't have the same connotation in English). "Ah, is that so? Lol" When you really stretched things in your interpretation.
*But anyway, I think this is good way to implement active learning as it* at the very least force us to recall information if you're asked direct questions. But if you were told to synthesize a lesson, it would force you to make sense of it/organize it in your head before you could put it in words, so would be even better.
But another way in which he could turn this into an even higher yield activity (this would be implementing level 4 of Bloom's Taxonomy, I think) would be to instead of just asking direct fact-recall questions, ask to elaborate on how 2 things were related, ask us to explain the chain of events that lead to a certain thing, etc. This would force us to look at all the isolated facts and try to understand how they relate to each other. Especially if these were things that weren't explicitly said and you had to conclude on your own.
For some this might sound like nothing, but given the state of education in my country a teacher (and the learning experience he provides) like this is so rare. And his enthusiasm for teaching is unmatched.
Amd the reading thing, he would sometimes would ask for silence during class, and start reciting some passage, or telling us a story from a book and then stop midway. We would always ask him to go on, but he refused, as he was trying to edge us so we'd read the book ourselves. Again, this type of thing is unmatched. I would safely bet my right hand that 95% of the population in my country has never read a book outside of an academic setting (and even within, you usually don't at least for high school and below). Having a teacher that showed us why we would *want* to read (as opposed to telling us why we should, why the youth should be informed, etc like other people (who by the way were hipocrates themselves lol)) is invaluable (even though no one usually did seek the book afterwards lol).
Am a maths teacher trying to teach my learners how to find simple interest and compound interest on investments. Most of my learners have fundamental gaps in understanding like most of my learners are unable to divide and multiply numbers, so most of my learners are able to make maths substitutions into formulas but get stuck when it comes to multiplying and dividing. How can I help my learners? Their ages range from (11 to 13)
Always good content. Thanks for sharing!
It's been really hard to change my old ways of studying. I still fall in the same habit of just memorizing information instead of asking myself if I really understood it. I want to test myself more and gain more knowledge at the course of this semester
What is the best study technique, that would apply reorganizing, active recall, and practice?
Hey there you got an answer yet? I am also doing research into the matter given I am starting uni.
@@yuval1168 yeah, you just Explain, simple yet powerful
1. You recall (ACTIVE RECALL) the information
2. You reorganize the information in your mind
its was goood experience to learn and for my surprise that I was actually doing passive learning thinking that I'm learning actively, the variations between both are so much differ in levels and I consider this as a bad experience in my life but I learned a lot and learning. by the way, thank you Benjamin for your videos and entertainment and love your voice bro...
If organization is important, is concept mapping done the right way not the best encoding technique?
I think concept mapping done in the right way helps to create knowledge structure.
@@benjaminkeep Then, do you ever recommend linear note taking?... I think properly chunked mindmaps are best for encoding
I was suprised to find out that word search is not effective. In my head, it was this persona that every learning that requires intense cognitive load is better.
This is similar to how we have to learn languages in real life. We hear sounds and try to make predictions of what they could be, eventually we are taught them, and try to frequently recall them. So looks like humans actually naturally do active learning :)
On that organizing knowledge part (4.15) Do you mean the *process* of organizing study topic is active learning? In other words you look at content you are studying and construct the mind map where you separate substance A, B and C, yes? If not then what?
Also Wow After all these years I realized that my high school math/physics teacher was damn good teacher because I still remember where do lightings come from it does not come from sky it comes from land. Sure that wasn't really relevant for physics 101 but still I still remember it all from those years ago.
I just love this guy bruh
Very useful information. Thank you!
i) i noticed with keen interest how practical coherent book shelves seem
ii) a spontaneous group work with neither clear tasks nor time frame i found rather futile, reminding me of your statistic teacher's approach
Hear hear on the poorly framed group work! One of my pet peeves, too. Maybe I find it doubly annoying b/c I think group work can be done really well, but often... isn't.
Is this correct? Passive learning is reading or watching done in order to acquire knowledge. Active learning is practicing retrieval and application of knowledge done in order to deepen understanding and to increase long term memory. But active learning cannot be done without first engaging in some passive learning--otherwise one has no knowledge to retrieve. It's not that one is better than the other, but that one needs to go beyond just passive learning.
I don't think so. You might watch this video (ua-cam.com/video/b5pRoCM7PII/v-deo.html) for more on active learning. Active learning and passive learning are really terms that refer to teaching approaches - and one is, indeed, better than the other, at least when you're talking about average effects. This might seem like a semantic issue, but it's helpful to be consistent about how we use these terms.
What you're talking about is closer to the difference between encoding and retrieval. But encoding isn't necessarily "passive" in the way you're talking about either. Consider the generation effect, where people who generate target words (e.g., "b_n_n_") remember them better than people who simply read them (e.g., "orange"). You might call generation (and various other beneficial encoding methods) "active". Certainly they often involve more active cognitive effort than simply reading. But you can also read in an active way. More on this in an upcoming video.
Sorry if this comment is a bit confusing. Hopefully I can clear this up more in the future.
@@benjaminkeep Yes, I was incorrectly synonymizing active learning with retrieval. From what I've been reading, active learning is the creation of knowledge (an explanation) of a concept by observing and searching for information, in contrast to passive learning which is being provided the explanation of the concept up front. Retrieval, then, would be a form of active processing. I think your linked video cleared it up nicely.
I didn't know that all those techniques were active learning.
A bad experience with active learning is that I DON'T KNOW HOW TO ORGANIZE MY KNOWLEDGE, for example I try to do mind maps while studying history to make connections with each other and engage my brain more but I just can't organize the mind maps or write only the important things and not copy the whole textbook because I'm afraid that when I come revise it and some of the things that should just come to my mind automatically seeing the map just won't come. At the end I just revise from the book because the mind map was confusing. Or the fact that it takes too much of my time.
The good experience was when I realized that unknowingly I was applying active learning in maths because I never studied it but applied everything explained by the teacher in problems and even if it was hard at first but little by little it imprinted itself in my mind and it became just a piece of cake.
Sorry I sort of ranted all my frustrations :)
Thanks for these examples!
I'm planning on exploring more when things like concept mapping or mind mapping work well and when they don't. I know that Justin Sung has a couple of videos on the topic. But want to dive into the research myself.
@@benjaminkeep i read book effective note taking from fiona mcpherson there is explanation about concept map
When I tried to predict the answers first, I tended to remember my predictions more than the correct answers.
is there a source to help me learning economics for for teenaged students
thanks for the video
Hi Benjamin, can you do a video on if memory training can improve the performance of being able to retain/decipher new information. Experts like Nelson Dellis, Alex Mullen come to mind?
Don't know those experts but have an upcoming video on when mnemonic techniques (like those used by memory athletes) might be appropriate.
@@benjaminkeep thanks, looking forward to the video, great work!
Heyy, I've been looking for content on "The Right kind of Practice"
Which of your videos might you recommend for the above? :o
Basically, I really want to focus on performance and procedural memory, or at higher-order thinking skills that help improve performance, especially in the long-run.
Honestly, I'm not sure I have exactly what you're looking for, but here are some:
Practice More Efficiently | Deliberate Practice - ua-cam.com/video/aIPS4ugcanM/v-deo.html
Secrets of Interleaved Practice - ua-cam.com/video/AWTYfzxBwPg/v-deo.html
What people get wrong about deliberate practice - ua-cam.com/video/WbUOY9ioIqw/v-deo.html
What no one tells you about learning faster - ua-cam.com/video/wRb32j6_pD4/v-deo.html
Learning beyond facts - ua-cam.com/video/7YtC24QnikY/v-deo.html
Can we apply active learning for learning a sport or a musical instrument? Or is it just for students and academic subjects?
Please reply 🌹
Hi again! That's a good question. The literature on active learning has mostly focused on academic subjects at the college or adult level (because that is where teachers tend to use lectures the most). And a lot of the typical active learning techniques tend to focus on information or concepts (like free recall, elaboration, worked examples, etc.).
With playing sports or an instrument, it's more generally accepted that you're going to have to practice. You can't just watch other people perform and expect to get good (though closely observing someone play a sport or an instrument can be valuable). For these kinds of well-defined skills, conversations tend to focus on how to structure the practice or training regimen (e.g., interleaved practice, deliberate practice, forms of feedback, what to focus on during play, etc.)
Partly, it's a question of what specific education communities need. The active/passive distinction makes some sense when talking about a college class: lectures are still the dominant form of learning on college campuses, although things are changing. The distinction is less important when talking about playing instruments or sports - active learning still "works" in those domains, but most teachers and students do some form of active learning, so the next question is how to structure that well.
What is the difference between apply and practice and how are the stages different for conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge? I would assume for procedural knowledge practice would be more important than in conceptual knowledge.
Good question - I wouldn't put a lot of weight on the difference. In some subjects, they can mean the same thing (for instance, solving math problems). But in other cases - like the example I talk about with the geology teacher - they might be applying their knowledge to sort rock samples, but "doing geology" (as a professional geologist) is considerably more involved than this. I don't know that a professor would call my example activity "practicing geology". I agree that practice is more heavily used in contexts where there's a well-defined skill involved and it's easy to see what that skill is (e.g., playing games like chess, solving math problems, riding a bike).
Most subjects or areas involve a mixture of procedural and conceptual knowledge. They support each other. Practice can helpfully develop both - often, concepts are clarified through application and practice. But there are a lot of physical skills that involve comparatively very little conceptual knowledge (like riding a bike, using a spoon, etc.).
2:55 Had teacherS like this and was bizarre af, i felt unconfortable fearing it would fuck me up later but there wasnt much i could do and i wasnt sadistic enough to ask for more shitty classes, luckly nothing bad happened.
what do you mean you are a kind of scientist? Are you a scientist or not sir? Please clarify this.
mindmap
4:50
Love from Pakistan Sir
I can't remember one teacher who taught like that.
1) Nothing in particular surprised me, I'm a few dozens of meters in my deep dive into this field/topic lolol
2) My best active learning experience was when in Japan, I was surrounded by the language and it was getting into my brain in a much more active way, since I was interracting with it and it's not like I could ignore it lol
organise knowlege
what was the most surprising thing i found in the video? I found ..uhm...rocks! You have rocks in the video, but no heavy metal
1:30 Which curiously mean that even IF IM THE ONE READING it's still passive!!!?? And thats why you should stop reflect, make questions, hypothesize, like im blatantly doing now and you did in your queen history video. Or simply thinking again and again just that damn trauma.
Hahaha how many confused messages do you get from machine learning people? 😂
For those who are not familiar, active learning is a sub discipline of machine learning too.