Czaplinski, Michal

Benefits of interactive engagement in education - Hake (1998) and beyond


What is Interactive Engagement (IE)?

 Hake (1998) defines it as 

“methods as those designed at least in part to promote conceptual understanding through interactive engagement of students in heads-on (always) and hands-on (usually) activities which yield immediate feedback through discussion with peers and/or instructors”


What this means is that IE methods emphasize active engagement, interaction with the material that is being taught. Examples of IE methods include:


- Collaborative Peer Instruction (CPI)

The method that engages students during class through activities that require each student to apply the core concepts being presented, and then to explain those concepts to their fellow students (Crouch & Mazur, 2001)


- Computer-based Labs (CBL)

Small-group exercises using computers.


- Concept Tests

Short conceptual questions given during the class, which probe students’ understanding of the material taught.


- Active Learning Problem Sets

Usually worksheets with different qualitative concept development activities, and problems that emphasize the multiple representation of processes.


- Socratic Dialogues

Posing questions to stimulate students’ to resolve them in a debate-like manner.


Benefits of IE

Hake (1998) showed that, with respect to physics education traditional methods, that is ones consisting of just lectures, were much less effective than IE methods. Among 62 introductory physics courses, the students enrolled in ones using IE showed, on average, an improvement double that of the students in traditional courses. 


Intuitively, such a finding sounds very plausible. What all the above methods have in common is (as the name itself reveals) that that they engage the student with the material that is being taught and the material is processed in a active manner. The traditional-style lectures, on the other hand are passive in that respect. It certainly seems likely that students, who were encouraged to be active by discussing the physical concepts with other students or model and explore the relevant physical phenomena using computer software would show a deeper understanding of the subject. 



Problems, criticisms and defense of IE

However, despite plausible benefits of IE, there is a number of issues that need to be resolved in order to show convincingly that IE really does make a difference that it is claimed it makes.

First of all, there is an issue of whether there is Hawthorne effect taking place, which might account for the improvement in classrooms using IE.

The effect is simply, without going into historical details, the influence of the mere fact of being studied or being subject to a change in circumstances on the results. Hence, in this context of effectiveness of IE, it might be the case that the the classes using IE showed improvement simply because there was a change in the way the material was taught. 

Additionally, there at least two issues that relate to Hake’s (1998) study directly - difference in class sizes (mean number of students in “traditional” classrooms was 149, but in IE was 92) and bias in sample selection - the instructors voluntarily administered the pre- and post-course tests to students and possibly the ones not showing the desired effect were discarded. 

Finally, there is an issue of experimental control, since, effectively, the samples were historical data and not data from a controlled experiment. Hence, a more careful experimental control 



However, some of those criticisms were answered in a recent (Deslauries, et al., 2011) study. In the experiment described, the students were divided into two groups, one taught using traditional methods, the other using methods which included short in-class discussions, active learning tasks and instructor’s feedback on those tasks. The progress was measured over a period of a week, where all students were previously taught using traditional methods and both groups were matched in terms of initial performance. The results showed that the experimental group greatly outperformed the traditional group. Hence, at a minimum, it is show that under carefully controlled conditions the IE outperform the traditional methods



Conclusions

It seems clear that IE is an effective method, which can substantially increase student’s understanding of the subject. Probably the single most important outstanding question is whether those methods would be just as effective in settings other than a physics course. While in physics, the ability to engage in scientific thinking, a firm grasp of the abstract concepts underlying the physical phenomena, and to ability to apply those concepts in novel contexts is crucial to true understanding of the subject, it is not the case in many other fields, because the structure of the body of knowledge that is being taught is fundamentally different. For example, it is uncertain if subjects such as law or anatomy would benefit from IE just as much since they are inherently less concept-driven and knowledge-based



References

Crouch, C. H., & Mazur, E. (2001). Peer Instruction: Ten years of experience and results. American Journal of Physics, 69(9). doi:10.1119/1.1374249

Deslauriers, L., & Schelew, E. (2011). Improved learning in a large-enrollment physics class. Science, 332. doi:10.1126/science.1201783

Hake, R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66(1).

Mayo,E. (1933) The human problems of an industrial civilization (New York: MacMillan) ch.3.