Active versus passive teaching styles: An empirical study of student learning outcomes
✍ Scribed by Norbert Michel; John James Cater III; Otmar Varela
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 119 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1044-8004
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This study compares the impact of an active teaching approach and a traditional (or passive) teaching style on student cognitive outcomes. Across two sections of an introductory business course, one class was taught in an active or "nontraditional" manner, with a variety of active learning exercises. The second class was taught in a passive or "traditional" manner, emphasizing daily lectures. Although the active learning approach does not appear to have improved overall mastery of the subject, we did find evidence that active learning can lead to improved cognitive outcomes in class-specific materials. The discussion emphasizes the role of delivery style on learning outcomes.
Because of increasing competitive demands both in the business world and in the academic community, management educators strive to provide the most productive classroom experience for their students in order to prepare them for careers in the business world. To achieve this objective, management educators constantly search for new and improved teaching methods. For many years, college instructors and professors in the United States operated under a paradigm in which they sought to impart knowledge to students in a form of information transfer . In this approach to teaching, students passively receive information from the professor and internalize it through some form of memorization. This process is characterized as passive learning . Although passive learning has been the dominant teaching method, many educators argue that students require more than a mere transfer of knowledge. The search for the best approach to business education has led educators to explore many different teaching techniques, ranging from the traditional lecture class to