After understanding the active and passive learning, I realized that the importance of active learning. Based on my experience, most of my classes like math and statistics are passive learning because teachers write down the notes on the blackboard while they are teaching new contents, and students are all busy copying the notes, and cannot focus on what the instructor is saying. Instructors are providing knowledge visually and aurally, but students need watch, hear and write them. I am distracted when I am watching, writing and hearing at the same time. In this case, I choose to give up one of writing and hearing, and catch up the materials after the class with taking photos of notes on the blackboard. While I am copying these notes, what the instructor was teaching in class will be more clear with the notes together. It seems that I take the lecture twice, so I remember more new knowledge. It’s one way that how I balance active learning and passive learning.
On the other hand, I experienced a very active class this term. It is a chinese classic literature course. The instructor uses the scaffolding a lot to teach the knowledge. Since we do not have to remember something like poetry, we just learn how to analyze them, we are not passive recipients of knowledge. The instructor guides us to understand what the author was trying to tell, but not tell us the meaning directly. We need to guess the meaning on our own first, and the instructor does not tell us it’s correct or wrong, he just provides some background information like what the author was experiencing. Therefore, we have more hints to guess, and we could make us as the author to feel the poetry.
In conclusion, I believe that active learning is more effective that passive learning because it is based on people’s own desire. They will keep thinking during active learning, instead of learning by rote.
Hi, Ling Jiang. I agree with you that active learning is more effective than passive learning. People who are active learners have clear learning goals, and after they achieve them they feel very satisfied and have a growing sense of accomplishment, and become very motivated the next time they want to learn. Long-term active learning is certainly good, enhances learning initiative, and learning efficiency will also be high. And passive learning, long-term, may trigger resistance, more and more do not want to learn the rebellious mentality.