What Is Active Learning

Active learning is a mostly broad term, which describes different ways of teaching that makes students’ accountable for their own learning. The term “active learning” was introduced by the English scholar Revans (1971) who was quite influential in promoting this type of educational method across the world. Charles Bonwell and James Eison, scholars in teaching excellence, are recognized in their most recent promotion of effective active learning techniques. The concept of active learning had been defined by many specialist and the scholars of education. Thus, there is no single, complete definition of active learning. However, a clarification of the term comes from Bonwell (1991) where he states that in active learning, students are the active

In comparison, the traditional method creates a teacher centered classroom where students are the passive listeners instead of active learners. Teachers demonstrate or conduct the experiments where students just sit idle, observe and listen to the teacher’s presentation which makes the learning inactive. Teacher provides the direct instruction, and lead whole class question and answer session. The one who knows the answer or the high achievers will raise their hand for the answers or otherwise teacher nominate a student to response. Research findings suggested that students’ concentration during lectures begins to decline every after 10-15 minutes (Wilson and Korn, 2007). This lecture type does not include open student interactions and instead focuses more on exposing students to course material (Wike, 2003). Thus, students land up memorizing the information given by the

According to Prince (2004), and Bonwell and Eison (1991) the key elements of the active learning includes (i) student involvement beyond mere listening, (ii) students involvement in learning activities such as reading, discussing, writing, (iii) more emphasis on the development of skills and less on transmittal of information, (iv) students involvement in higher order thinking skills, and (v) an emphasis on students’ exploration of values and attitudes. The students are given opportunity to discuss, interact, share ideas, guide and hand on activity thereby helping the students who struggles during the process of learning. Thus, the students are provided with safe environment in which they can interact without fear of embarrassment (Steven,