The right tool for the right job. Reconciling the debate about active learning.

I really like the work Amedee Marchand Martella has been doing, lately. She published a well-reasoned review and critique of the active learning literature in which she called for more rigorous and systematic investigation of active learning pedagogies. Now, following good practice in theory development, Martella and her colleagues (2024) have published a two-experiment test of active learning versus lecture pedagogies. In the first experiment, college psychology student were randomly assigned to either a 100% lecture condition or a 100% active learning condition, and their learning was assessed via posttests including both verbatim and inference questions. In the first experiment, they found students learned more in the all-lecture condition than the all-active-learning condition (partial eta-squared = .14). Martella and colleagues did this all-or-nothing comparison because, in the past, studies of active learning v. lecture typically involved a comparison of all-lecture versus a mix of lecture and active learning, and a true 100% lecture vs 100% active learning test was needed. But, of course most educators don't teach with just a single pedagogy the entire class period. Even educators as poor as this guy try to mix it up:

Nice mix of active learning and lecture pedagogies, Ben. (That was me being sarcastic, by the way.)

In the second experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a 100% lecture condition, a condition where lecture and active learning were interspersed, or a condition where lecture and active learning were delivered in blocks. Participants in the interspersed condition learned more than those in the blocked condition (d = .40) or the lecture condition (d = .47), with no statistically detectable difference between those two conditions.

Now, I wasn't so surprised that students in the interspersed condition did best. I'm a "right tool for the right job" kind of person - lecture when needed, then have students engage/practice actively. But formal, systematic tests like these two experiments are needed to begin building the evidence base for more theory- and content-driven mixings of lecture and active learning. That's how you build a better theory of pedagogy and learning. And, of course, this study had limitations (e.g., using video lecture rather than live lecture, a relatively short instructional period, a pretty immediate posttest rather than delayed ones). But, overall, it was a reasonable set of studies to follow Martella and colleagues' previous review, and a nice next step toward identifying how to tailor instructional pedagogies.