Teaser from a Blog Post by David Gooblar. Click here to read the whole thing. 

Search for “active learning” on Google Scholar or JSTOR and you’ll find that such results are not at all surprising. Article after article confirms our new consensus: Get students active in class — whether by using group work or techniques like think-pair-share or by allowing students to decide important aspects of the course — and they’ll learn more.

All of which is why the title of a 2011 article fairly jumps off the screen: “Active Learning Not Associated with Student Learning in a Random Sample of College Biology Courses.” The study— led by Tessa Andrews, then a graduate student at Montana State University and now an assistant professor at the University of Georgia — runs counter to the bulk of evidence on the subject. But the nature of its findings have potentially great significance for teachers who want to take advantage of the benefits of active learning.