Learning By Doing
Friggin' jet engines...how do they work?
Pop Quiz! Do your best to answer the following questions:
- Why is cold air super-heated in the combustion chamber?
- What shape are the stator blades on the turbine?
- Why is the outlet narrower than the intake?
- We all know jet engines are extremely loud. What makes them so noisy?
Now it's time to introspect on your learning experience. While you were watching the video, what did you do to learn the material? Did you:
- Passively listen to the voiceover and watch the animations?
- Pause the video and take notes?
- Ask yourself questions or attempt to connect the material to what you already know?
- Talk to a friend about the video?
Depending on the activities in which you engaged, we can make an educated guess about the likelihood of your learning the material. The iCAP Framework [2] makes the following predictions:
- Shallow learning occurs when a student passively processes the material;
- Better learning results when the student actively does something to learn the material;
- We would observe even better learning if the student is making connections and constructively working with the material;
- The best learning outcome would be observed in an interactive discussion.
Passive
This is the easiest learning process to describe. Passive learning occurs when the student engages in no overt behavior. A great example is a student listening to a lecture. Presumably, the learner is listening to the words in the lecture and looking at the images (assuming there is a slide presentation). In other words, during passive learning, the information is being attended to and it passes through working memory. From there, it is anybody's guess as to the ultimate fate of that information. In the best case, the presented material is stored in long-term memory in such a way that it is available for later recall. However, from the outside observer's point of view, the student is not overtly doing anything to remember the material.Active
Here's where things get a little more interesting. An active learning process requires that the student engage in an overtly observable behavior. Going back to our lecture example, a student would be said to be engaged in active learning if she is taking notes. Another example would be highlighting a passage in a textbook. The external behavior that occurs during active learning results in some external representation (e.g., notes or highlighting). Active learning is the hallmark of many other learning theories, which suggest that the student should be doing something while learning. In fact, active learning forms the basis of John Dewey's pragmatic educational philosophy [3].Constructive
The problem with active learning is that it mainly focuses on the overt learning behavior instead of considering the content or quality of those behaviors. Thus, a constructive learning process is one in which the learner goes beyond the information that is immediately presented. For example, suppose I gave a student the following function: f(x) = ax2 + bx + c, and I tell the student, "This is a quadratic function." Recognizing that the prefix "quad-" is the same as a class of shapes (i.e., quadrilaterals), the student points out that a square is a quadrilateral, and that the formula for calculating the area of a square is A = x2. This student is wildly constructive because she has made connections to her previous knowledge and elaborated the original message. Thus, constructive learning takes active learning one step further by adding new information to the target material [4].Interactive
Being constructive is a great learning strategy because a student is much more likely to remember something when he or she generates it for him- or herself (see the generation effect). However, construction typically happens while learning alone. Interactive learning says that the lesson or material will be better understood if it is done in the context of a learning partner. The reason for the advantage is that two different people typically have non-overlapping knowledge, in that they share some of the same knowledge, but they also know some things that the other person does not. We also see things differently. The reason interactive learning can be better than constructive learning is when collaborators infer new knowledge together. In the literature, this idea goes by many names, including co-construction or co-inference.To summarize, Table 1 defines each learning process and provides a concrete example.
| Learning Process | Definition | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Passive | No overt activity | Listening to a lecture |
| Active | Overt activity is observed Learning by doing |
Taking notes during a lecture |
| Constructive | Going beyond the given information | Drawing a concept map |
| Interactive | Co-inferring new information with a partner | Collaboratively identifying differences and similarities |
Table 1. A summary of each learning process.
The S.T.E.M. Connection
Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." When students are given a video to learn from, it is very tempting to sit back and assume a passive learning orientation. After all, that's what we do when we watch television. That might change with the rise in popularity of educational videos; however, most of us have been trained to treat videos as entertainment. One way to combat passive learning is to give the student a task while watching the video that pushes them toward the active/constructive end of the continuum.Another suggestion is to ask students to watch videos in pairs with the explicit instructions to pause the video and ask each other questions. This is a good way to structure collaborative learning because the students can learn from the video as well as from each other [5].
I realize it's not always possible, or even desirable, to ask students to work collaboratively and co-construct new information. But I think the iCAP Framework is a useful way of organizing the learning literature because it helps highlight learning processes that are more (or less) effective. Our goal as instructional designers is to use the framework to select the appropriate learning process for the task at hand.
Share and Enjoy!
Dr. Bob
Going Beyond the Information Given
[1] The video "Jet Engine, How it works ?" is produced by Learn Engineering. If you are interested in learning more about a variety of other engineering topics (e.g., wind turbines), this is a good resource.[2] Chi, M. T. H., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational Psychologist, 49, 219-243.
[3] I find this idea so useful that I open each blog with the heading Learning By Doing.
[4] Again, I find this idea so compelling that each blog also has also has a section entitled Going Beyond the Information Given.
[5] Chi, M. T. H., Roy, M., & Hausmann, R.G.M. (2008) Observing tutorial dialogues collaboratively: Insights about human tutoring effectiveness from vicarious learning. Cognitive Science, 32(2), 301-341.
