The positive influence of active learning in a lecture hall: an analysis of normalised gain scores in introductory environmental engineering

Abstract

Burgeoning college enrolments and insufficient funding to higher education have expanded the use of large lecture courses. As this trend continues, it is important to ensure that students can still learn in those challenging learning environments. Within education broadly and undergraduate engineering specifically, active learning pedagogies have been developed to overcome some of those issues in a traditional classroom setting. However, active learning has not been well established in large, lecture-hall classroom environments. This study investigates an active learning approach that was used for an introductory environmental engineering course of 269 students in a tiered lecture hall. Analyses using normalised gain scores illuminate statistically significant differences between learning gains in content delivered using the active learning method versus a traditional, lecture-only delivery. There were no significant interaction effects across different student characteristics.