“Passive Learning” is Underrated

Now more than ever, we need to be able to pay attention.

Schools of the 21st century call for active learning, say edu-advocates. When students have to figure things out for themselves, they experience “deeper” understanding than if they were just “spoon-fed” by an instructor.

Under this narrative, the way to learn new content is through hands-on exploration, inquiry projects, group work — anything other than sitting silently and being taught directly. If you support the simple old-fashioned way, you want students to be passive.

Perhaps “active learning” originally meant nothing more than “learning through activities,” but contrasted with “passive,” it takes on a new implication. To be a “passive learner” sounds like lazy, uncritical deference to authority. If lessons situate learners as either “active” or “passive,” then teaching methods make the difference between independent thinkers and sheep!

In reality, this active-over-passive hierarchy ignores how knowledge is actually built. Content learned “actively” is not better, realer, or deeper; in fact, we have plenty of evidence to believe the opposite. And true independent thinking can’t even begin to take place without learning “passively.”

Active Learning Experiences Are Too Noisy

In one sense, “engaging” class activities can literally get too noisy. A room full of jagged, overlapping chatter is not an environment conducive to paying attention and processing new material; this should go without saying.

More generally, these experiences carry a lot of “noise” along with the new content intended to be the signal. This makes the real lesson harder to retain.

Say students are meant to learn about how the circulatory system works. Instead of taking notes from a whole-class lecture or video, these active learners must read up on it on their Chromebooks and create labeled, color-coded diagrams in groups, as the teacher circles the room to monitor their progress. Classic example.

Now, as students try to make sense of the new information about the circulatory system, their minds are busy juggling other things: What exactly are we supposed to do? Who’s going to draw? Here’s the blue marker. How much time do we have left? Nice, that’s colored neatly. Who has good handwriting for the labels?

Clearly, none of this mental chatter is helping them learn about the circulatory system. The learning had to take place before they decided what to put on their diagram. It happened when they read the page on their Chromebooks — or skimmed it just enough to do their part of the assignment.

Ideally, “engaging” elements of a lesson are like spoonfuls of sugar helping the medicine go down. But that sugar wouldn’t be so helpful if your body could only digest limited amounts of what it’s fed, selecting based on what your tastebuds notice most. The medicine would get outcompeted, flushed out.

That’s more like how learning works. Before new things can make their way into our long-term memory, they must be processed in working memory, the “workspace” of things you’re holding in your attention at the moment. Working memory is very limited. In activities that require learners to juggle multiple components, or dedicate mental energy to figuring things out, there’s less of this tight resource for the new information they need.

So with this in mind, “passive” methods can better be described as direct, focused delivery of the signal, cutting out the noise.

Can Passive Learners Become Active Thinkers?

Some might take issue with the idea that knowledge is “delivered.” Isn’t it “constructed” in the learner’s own mind?

This misinterprets constructivism. It’s not a theory of teaching; it’s a theory of what’s going on inside when someone’s learning, no matter the format. A network of knowledge is constructed in relation to what you already know, period, regardless of whether you’re fully engaged figuring things out or sitting back getting lectured.

So it’s not as if there’s more “active construction” going on when you’re given incomplete information and have to fill in the gaps. With full information, it’s easier to build the whole accurate picture of what’s meant to be learned.

That’s what we want, right? Learners leaving with knowledge they didn’t have before? Often, they can’t arrive at it just by thinking really hard, and it’s not fair to expect them to. (Frustrated students wonder, “Why won’t the teacher just explain it to us?”)

Rest assured, being told new information isn’t intellectual coddling. It doesn’t stifle your general ability to think for yourself. On the contrary, “independent” thinking is of little use if it’s not built on a solid foundation of knowledge. A child could come up with a creative solution for a highway to Hawaii, but that won’t do us any good. To generate ideas of value, you need to accept the constraints of reality.

In science, that means knowing Newton’s laws, the laws of thermodynamics, the discoveries that revolutionized physics, chemistry, and biology, and so forth. Being able to derive them yourself? Not necessary, or even realistic. And skeptically arguing with them won’t get you anywhere when your critiques are based on the flimsy knowledge base of a novice.

We evaluate everything in light of what we already know. That’s how you know “Michael J. Fox, the third president of the United States, was responsible for establishing Presbyterianism as the state religion of the new federation after its peaceful secession from the English empire” can’t be right. The same thing happens when trained scientists sniff out pseudoscience in a social media post, or statisticians spot a sneaky misuse of numbers. You don’t have to be taught to think “critically” — with relevant knowledge, it happens automatically.

Scratch the surface of any original thought that seems like the output of great critical thinking, and you’ll see the prior learning that made it possible. The process of generating it depended on certain facts being accepted as true. Knowledge is what we think with. And your thinking can’t be shaped by the knowledge you don’t have.

You can’t “stand on the shoulders of giants” if you can’t even find their shoulders.

Active Practice is Not Active Learning

Readers, you’re probably familiar with one finding in learning research: studying through active recall leads to better retention than studying by re-reading. The evidence is strikingly consistent. Doesn’t this support that “active” beats “passive”?

Let me be clear. The best practices for strengthening knowledge are not necessarily the best for acquiring it. In order to “actively recall” information, it has to be in your brain in the first place!

And overwhelmingly, instruction that’s explicitly guided leads to better recall later on:

• Higher math and science scores on the TIMSS international assessment are correlated with higher reported amounts of class time spent listening to the instructor and memorizing formulas (source).
• Similar thing with PISA problem-solving — on both the individual and national levels, more reported class time spent on lecturing is associated with higher science scores, and more reported class time spent on inquiry-based activities (e.g. “Students spend time in the laboratory doing practical experiments,” “Students are asked to do an investigation to test ideas,” and “Students are required to argue about science questions”) is associated with lower science scores (source).

• Project Follow Through was the largest randomized educational trial ever conducted in the US, involving over 700,000 children in 170 disadvantaged communities. It found that of various interventions, direct instruction led to levels of improvement that basically blew the other interventions out of the water (source).

Incredible!

One implication of this is that if you don’t fully understand new material, you shouldn’t jump to “active recall” practice too soon. This is especially true when it comes to problem-solving, which is more mentally taxing than merely remembering what goes on the other side of a flash card.

To learn how to solve a new kind of problem, such as in calculus or algebra-based physics, you need to devote much of your working memory to processing all the parts and how they fit together. With such a heavy cognitive load, there’s little mental space left to handle the transferable takeaways.

Studying a worked example lightens this load. This way, the whole procedure can more easily make its way into your long-term memory. The next time you solve something like it, you won’t have to keep thinking, “What’s next?”, looking back and forth between your notes and your paper — it’ll all fit together more intuitively.

Indeed, controlled experiments confirm the power of the “worked example effect” when learning new problem-solving procedures. (So don’t doze off when professors solve a problem for you. It’ll come in handy!)

In Defense of Listening and Learning

I admit — I have a hard time paying attention in lectures. But if I’m going to make the most of my education, I can’t just shrug and accept that.

There’s a direct connection between how well I focus on my professors’ explanation of a topic and how well I can recall it later on. Simply Googling it on the fly for a homework assignment won’t do; my understanding will be more shallow. I’m sure many students realized this in the age of distance learning.

Would it be easier to keep me focused if lectures were more “interesting”? Sure. But I can’t blame professors; they try their best and can’t always guarantee that a topic won’t bore anyone. I’m the one responsible for the contents of my own mind. I’m ultimately the only one who can keep it in the right place at the right time.

Folks say the Internet is filled with opportunities to learn. But how often do you actually see someone dedicate the time to learn a whole subject online, the way they’d learn it in a structured series of college courses? More often, we grab the scattered bits that already interest us, the ones that don’t challenge us too much. With endless opportunities for short-term gratification, we lack the discipline to avoid distractions and focus on long-term learning.

Direct instruction isn’t mere “passive learning.” We underestimate the active effort it takes to wholeheartedly listen and learn.