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.

This is the powerpoint that was used to kick off the discussion of active learning.

A new Active Learning book that is getting good reviews

Tanner, K. D. (2013). Structure matters: twenty-one teaching strategies to promote student engagement and cultivate classroom equity. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(3), 322-331.

I like the way that this article organizes the strategies and provides some context for why they may work. 

Many of your students may have experienced only traditional lecturing before they show up in your class. If you suddenly plunge them into active learning with no preparation, their assumption may be that you’re either playing some kind of game with them or conducting an experiment with them as the guinea pigs, neither of which they appreciate, and you may experience some vigorous pushback.

This issue of the "Tomorrow's Professor" eNewsletter lays out some common active learning mistakes and how to avoid them. 

This is a collection of resources from the Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) project site. The site is a few years old and is experiencing some "link rot" - addresses that no longer work. However, there are still some high quality resources here. I wonder if the folks at TIEE would be open to suggestions for updating this collection?

Great list of examples of active learning strategies

Education research study published in PNAS 2014

News Feature from Nature with the subtitle: "Active problem-solving confers a deeper understanding of science than does a standard lecture. But some university lecturers are reluctant to change tack."