Large-scale comparison of science teaching methods sends clear message

The quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the United States has long been an area of national concern, but that concern has not resulted in improvement. Recently, there has been a growing sense that an opportunity for progress at the higher education level lies in the extensive research on different teaching methods that have been carried out during the last few decades. Most of this research has been on “active learning methods” and the comparison with the standard lecture method in which students are primarily listening and taking notes. As the number of research studies has grown, it has become increasingly clear to researchers that active learning methods achieve better educational outcomes. The possibilities for improving postsecondary STEM education through more extensive use of these research-based teaching methods were reflected in two important recent reports (1, 2). However, the size and consistency of the benefits of active learning remained unclear. In PNAS, Freeman et al. (3) provide a much more extensive quantitative analysis of the research on active learning in college and university STEM courses than previously existed. It was a massive effort involving the tracking and analyzing of 642 papers spanning many fields and publication venues and a very careful analysis of 225 papers that met their standards for the meta-analysis. The results that emerge from this meta-analysis have important implications for the future of STEM teaching and STEM education research. In active learning methods, students are spending a significant fraction of the class time on activities that require them to be actively processing and applying information in a variety of ways, such as answering questions using electronic clickers, completing worksheet exercises, and discussing and solving problems with fellow students. The instructor designs the questions and activities and …