{"id":13738,"date":"2026-05-05T09:19:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T13:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/excellence\/?post_type=resources&p=13738"},"modified":"2026-09-01T17:30:44","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T21:30:44","slug":"active-learning","status":"publish","type":"resources","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/excellence\/resources\/active-learning\/","title":{"rendered":"Active Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Educational Benefits<\/h2>\n