How can faculty inspire students to take a more central role in their learning? Active learning is a term used to describe instructional strategies that promote students’ active participation in knowledge construction processes (Bonwell & Eisen 1991; Prince 2004).

Such strategies may include hands-on activities, brief writing and discussion assignments, problem solving tasks, information gathering and synthesis, question generation, and reflection-based activities, among others. Together, these approaches seek to engage learners’ higher order thinking skills through the production and articulation of knowledge, as opposed to through the passive transmission of facts and ideas.

Active learning tasks are designed to tease out learners’ current understanding, make that understanding explicit, and then create opportunities for learners to integrate new knowledge into their understanding.

Educational Benefits

  • Active learning benefits all students, but offers disproportionate benefits for individuals from underrepresented groups (Theobald et al., 2020).
  • Active learning contributes to higher exam scores and pass rates across STEM fields (Freeman et al., 2014).
  • Interactive courses are more effective in promoting conceptual understanding compared to traditional ones (Hake, 1998).

Despite the above research, some students perceive that they learn less in active learning environments, but effective framing, open conversation, and effective facilitation of activities by the instructor can help counter this misconception (Deslauriers et al. 2019; Tharayil et al., 2018).

In Practice

See how BU professors and instructors are incorporating active learning in their courses!

Boston University Large Course Initiative Examples

In collaboration with several programs in BU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute is engaged in a multi-year initiative to redesign the student experience in large classes that typically have 100 or more students. This initiative provides an opportunity to reimagine and develop new approaches to course redesign, student assessment, classroom teaching techniques and the creation of instructional resources that promote engagement and learning in some of BU’s largest introductory courses.

In this video, Dr. Keying Chen, Lecturer of Chemistry in the College of Arts & Sciences, explains of the Chemistry teaching team implement audience response systems in the classroom to increase student engagement.

BU Active Learning Examples

These select BU examples show how active learning can work in a variety of educational contexts.

  • Active Learning in Large Classrooms. Liz Co, Senior Lecturer of Biology in the College of Arts & Sciences, integrates active learning via case studies in her biology classes to better engage students after realizing they struggled with critical thinking exam questions compared to memorization questions.
  • “BU Teaching Awards Honor Two Outstanding Educators.” Renato Mancuso, Associate Professor of Computer Science in the College of Arts & Sciences, received the 2023 Gerald and Deanne Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology for the development and deployment of CodeBuddy in their Fundamentals of Computing Systems course. CodeBuddy helps make in class coding activities more active and participatory.
  • Office of the Provost Learning Assistant Program. BU’s Learning Assistant Program defines active learning and showcases how learning assistants be leveraged effectively to help manage more active learning opportunities in the classroom.

Supporting Technology

Whether in-person or online, active learning can be administered in a variety of formats. Here are a few centrally supported technologies that can be leveraged to encourage students to actively engage with course concepts both in and outside of class:

Additional Resources

This section provides additional resources organized by discipline for further information.

Connect with the Institute for Excellence in Teaching & Learning team with questions or to schedule a consultation at excellence@bu.edu.

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Updated
September 1st, 2026
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