Active Learning increases the effectiveness and efficiency of the teaching and learning process. Teachers want students to leave a class with knowledge and or skills they did not have when they began the class. Months later, teachers want those same students to retain the learning, apply it to new situations, build upon that learning to develop new perspectives, and continue the learning process.

This level of learning, resulting in retention and transfer, occurs most efficiently through concrete activity-based experiences. Why? The answer is...

Active Learning involves input from multiple sources through multiple senses (hearing, seeing, feeling, etc.).


Active Learning involves process, interacting with other people and materials, accessing related schemata in the brain, stimulating multiple areas of the brain to act.


Active Learning involves output, requiring students to produce a response or a solution or some evidence of the interActive Learning that is taking place.