Experiential learning (Paper 1 ) by AmritaTejpal

Experiential Learning

Lectures: A Venerable Tradition

Lectures are a way of transferring the instructor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either. – Eric Mazur

Like a chapter in a good textbook, a lecture is an efficient way to deliver course content. However, delivering course content is not always the same thing as fostering actual learning. Studies have shown that during a typical lecture, student attention begins to diminish after the first ten minutes.[1] Additionally, students usually capture in their lecture notes only a small portion of the content that an instructor conveys verbally [2], and – as Harvard's Eric Mazur has often pointed out – they remember even less of it. Yet despite these limitations, lectures continue to be a dominant pedagogical mode in many universities, probably for three reasons.

First, instructors tend to teach the way that they themselves were taught. If the courses you took as an undergraduate were lecture-based, then that’s probably how you began teaching your undergraduates. We tend to re-enact what is familiar. Moreover, lectures have a venerable history. For centuries – prior to about 1850 when textbooks came to be mass produced – lectures were the only feasible way for scholars to share content with students. 

Second, it’s easy for an instructor – especially one who is teaching a course that is prerequisite to another course – to become focused on covering “content” rather than on ensuring that students are actually learning.

Third, many instructors point out that large class sizes makes it difficult to do anything other than lecture during class. This is a genuine challenge, though there are also some ways to mitigate it.
 

Experiential Learning

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. Men become builders by building. – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

One alternative to lectures – or at least a complement to them – is experiential learning. To some extent, experiential learning is self-explanatory: it’s learning that is based on students being directly involved in a learning experience rather than their being recipients of ready-made content in the form of lectures. This kind of experiential learning is probably what Benjamin Franklin had in mind in the eighteenth century when he wrote, “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I will learn.”

The notion of experiential learning was explored further in the twentieth century by educational psychologists such as John Dewey, Carl Rogers, and David Kolb. Kolb asserted that “Learning is the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience,” and he proposed a “learning cycle” that comprises these four phases:
 

Stage	Example
The learner has a “concrete experience.”	In a mechanical engineering course, students are asked to use 20 popsicle sticks to build a small bridge that will support 500 grams.
The learner makes observations and reflections based upon that experience.	Students note which popsicle sticks failed first, whether the sticks supported more when they were laid flat versus on their edges, and so on.
The observations and reflections are synthesized into a new conceptual understanding and interpretation of the experience.	Students develop a list of construction “principles” or best practices.
This conceptual understanding is applied and is used to guide new and purposeful experiences.	Students build another iteration of the bridge with the list of construction principles in mind.

Represented as a continuous process, Kolb’s cycle looks like this:

Drawing on Kolb's learning cycle, many universities have developed their own definitions of experiential learning. The University of Waterloo emphasizes the "intentional and reflective learning from experience" component. Simon Fraser University has developed a more extended definition: "the strategic, active engagement of students in opportunities to learn through doing, and reflection on those activities, which empowers them to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical endeavours in a multitude of settings inside and outside of the classroom."