How Can We Make Active Learning Work in K-12 Education? Considering Prerequisites for a Successful Construction of Understanding.

Abstract

Active learning holds great promise for improving education, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Instead of receiving information passively, students take agency and actively construct their own understanding. A large meta-analysis has suggested that these features improve student performance in STEM (Freeman et al., 2014). Many instructional practices that promote active learning have the added benefit of making students familiar with the scientific process of testing theories via predictions and observations. Active learning could also contribute to reducing achievement gaps and empowering students from underrepresented groups to consider careers in science. It therefore seems paramount to synthesize a framework of active learning that guides research and practice in this field, and I applaud Lombardi and colleagues (this issue) for their interdisciplinary efforts to do so. Although the promises of active learning are wideranging, research on its merits has predominantly focused on undergraduate instruction. The meta-analysis by Freeman and colleagues (2014) focused exclusively on undergraduates, and so does the synthesis by Lombardi and colleagues. Does active learning work equally well for younger students, from kindergarten to 12th grade (K–12)? Or are there prerequisites for benefiting from active learning that younger students do not yet meet? And can the construction-of-understanding ecosystem proposed by Lombardi and colleagues inform research and practice in K–12 education as well? Answers to these questions are important for improving scientific literacy in society at large. Attempting to close achievement gaps at earlier ages is more effective and has higher returns than doing so later (Heckman, 2006). Furthermore, bringing active-learning practices into K–12 education could facilitate the transition to such practices at the undergraduate level. Currently, active-learning methods are often less popular among first-year undergraduate students than among more advanced undergraduates who have more experience with these methods (Zinski et al., 2017). Therefore, in the following, I attempt to provide some answers, acknowledging that these are preliminary and subject to future research that will hopefully be sparked by the construction-of-understanding ecosystem framework. Leaning on the synthetic definition offered by Lombardi and colleagues, I use active-learning practices as an umbrella term for instructional activities that are intended to afford students agency over their learning and that foster active construction of understanding. Do active-learning practices work as well in K–12 education as in undergraduate instruction? This question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. A first difficulty is terminology. Most research that has dealt with active-learning practices in K–12 education has placed them under the umbrella term inquiry-based teaching/learning, which spans even wider than active learning. Putting terminology issues aside for a moment, several fairly up-to-date meta-analyses have contrasted some forms of active-learning practices as realized under inquiry-based curricula with more directive instructional practices (Alfieri et al., 2011; D’Angelo et al., 2014; Furtak et al., 2012; Lazonder & Harmsen, 2016; Rönnebeck et al., 2016). Findings regarding effectiveness of these curricula in improving student performance have been mixed and underwhelming. A common thread across these meta-analyses is that effectiveness 997376 PSIXXX10.1177/1529100621997376BrodActive Learning in K–12 research-article2021