Learning By Doing: The Power of Active Learning and Authentic Assessments in the Political Science Classroom

Political Science Educator: volume 27, issue 1

Assignments and Course Design

Nicholas Kapoor, Fairfield University, and Carrie LeVan, Colby

As students, many of us experienced years of passive learning, where teachers act as the primary agents of education as experts who thoughtfully pass down knowledge to their students. Through this sage-on-the-stage model, teachers lectured to the students for 75-90 minutes and then made students regurgitate back information on assessments. While lecturing contains some merit, it can render students passive learners who are less likely to learn or retain the content. Passive learning means that the brain retains very little. To learn and remember, students must work with the information—test it, recap it, and explain it; teachers cannot learn for them (Oakley 2011; Lang 2021). Learners must use the information in class in meaningful ways, making deep neural connections between the learner and the information (Ambrose, et al. 2010).

Active learning, in contrast, includes any activity in which every student must think, create, or solve a problem. As an unattributed quotation tells us, “Tell me something, and I will forget. Show me, and I will remember. Involve me, and I will learn.” Teachers engage students in the learning process and connect them to the course material. Rather than listening to the instructor deliver content, students engage in activities that require them to think critically, argue, reflect, and analyze as they process course content. As Gonzales (2018) tells us: “To learn, students need to do something.” Active learning gets beyond activities and gives students the space to understand the rationale for the task. Meta-narration–explaining to students the reasoning for the task–offers more engagement with the lessons’ material than just handing students an activity with no context.

Active learners retain more information, understand the material at a deeper level, develop critical thinking skills, and perform better on course assignments and assessments (Oakley 2011). Mcmanus and Taylor (2009) describe the core tenants of active learning as student activity; student engagement; student reflection; and analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. An activity may last 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or longer. The structure of the activity and the rationale provided to the students remain vital components of the activity’s success.

In this essay, we invite you to bring active learning to your classroom and provide a framework for doing so.

Active Learning in the Classroom

Lesson planning remains vital for successful active learning. If you find the lesson plan boring, your students will also find the class dull. Moreover, if having an empty room maintains the same learning outcomes, you should rethink your lesson. Below are three example class sessions with built-in active learning strategies.

Class A – Sample 50-minutes class – Lecture, Activity, Repeat

Class B – Sample 50-minutes class – No Lecture

Class C – Sample 75 minute class – Mini-Lecture, Scaffolded Activity

What happens between the beginning and end of the semester, however, differs. Each example illustrates how active learning can be incorporated in various forms. In Class A, active learning comes in quick bursts between short lectures.

Alternatively, in Class B, active learning takes the whole class. In this example, students work through a single challenge, assignment, or activity, having check-ins as they make progress. There is no one way to incorporate active learning into one’s class, but the goal should be allowing students to apply information and see it in a new light. Activity and mini-lecture lengths may vary based on the goals of the activities and mini-lectures. Flexibility and the ability to pivot based on the classroom flow are also essential. Do not be afraid to have an entire class of just active learning activities, as in Class B above. To understand this further, check out this lesson on Federalism that can be found online at https://educate.apsanet.org/federalism-in-practice.^[1]

But how do I do it?

Below are some ideas for classroom activities. Remember that passive learning prevents retention of information. Students need to grapple with the information— test it, recap it, and explain it. We invite you to review the ideas below, pick a lesson, and create an activity around it.^[2] You should consider the following questions when planning your activity. How would you describe the activity? Why would students want to engage in this activity? How would students reflect on what they learned during the activity? How would the instructor provide feedback to the students?

Speed Dating: Organize the students of the course into two concentric rings, each containing the same number of students. (In very large courses, it may be helpful to use several pairs of concentric rings so that each group contains no more than
about twenty students.) Assign the students a problem or topic to discuss in pairs consisting of one student from the outer circle and one from the inner circle. After a set period of time (usually only one to five minutes), have one of the circles rotate to change the pairs. Repeat this exercise three or four times until each student receives many different perspectives on the topic, ways of solving the problem, or opportunities to explain how to accomplish a task.

Pass a Problem: Divide the students of the class into groups of approximately six to ten. Have each group develop a problem or discussion question based on the material covered in the unit currently under study. They should also devise their solution to the problem or set of key points to discuss that issue. Each group then sends its problem to another group and receives a problem in return. After each group makes it through each problem, the entire class comes back together and discusses the different solutions.

Top Ten List: Working in groups, students create lists in reverse priority order of the top ten facts or observations about a particular unit. The activity helps students weigh the significance of different aspects of the course material. Students may produce humorous answers. List-making is a particularly effective way to begin and end your class when trying to get students to either recall what they learned last time or reflect on what they just learned. For example, when introducing several key terms from a previous class, hand out different colored post-its that correspond to a term. Have students write what they believe that term means and then write it on a virtual board like Padlet or Mentimeter. This allows the instructor to return to material that confused students.

Looking for more active learning ideas?
1.Setting Discursive Expectations on Day One:
Ideas for using the “Four Corners” Activity 
in Synchronous and Asynchronous Courses
2. Teaching American Politics: 
Small Teaching Exercises – A Library of Learning Tools
3. Teaching American Politics: 
Civic Exercises

What are Authentic Assessments?

 Wiggins (1998) defines authentic assessments by connecting realism with active learning. Authentic assessment realistically replicates the test of a person’s abilities in real-world situations; requires judgment, innovation, and originality; asks the student to “do” the subject; and carries out exploration and work within the discipline. It draws upon the key components of active learning. It simulates the contexts in which adults are “tested” in the workplace, civic life, or personal life. It assesses the student’s ability to successfully employ a repertoire of knowledge and skill to negotiate a complex task. It allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult resources, and get feedback on and refine performances and products.

Fink (2013) explains the positive impact of authentic assessment on students: “Authentic tasks are so important if we want to create testing situations that will teach and improve student learning, not just measure it. Assessment is authentic when we anchor testing in the kind of work people do, rather than merely eliciting easy-to-score responses to simple question” (95). Imagine how many times as an instructor you have gone to a department meeting and been given a multiple- choice quiz. Fink continues, “The idea is to focus student learning on realistic and meaningful tasks through cycles of performance – feedback – revision – new performance. This is essential to help them learn to use information, resources, and notes to perform effectively in context. Rather than create questions and problems with no context, the teacher should strive to create a problem of question that has a meaningful, real, authentic context that the students might face in the future and that allows the students to actually use recently acquired knowledge and skills” (113).

Fink reminds us that assessments should allow students to struggle, receive feedback, grow, and learn by demonstrating mastery of a particular learning outcome. Traditional assessments give students a single opportunity to demonstrate learning. If they fail, they lack further opportunities to improve. Authentic assessments allow students to operate as we do in the real world. For example, as faculty, we develop our scholarship with multiple stages of feedback. We take it to conferences to receive feedback, make revisions, submit for publication, receive feedback, revise and resubmit, edit, and so on.

How do I do it?

We look at creating authentic assessments through Bloom’s Taxonomy outlined below.

Bloom’s taxonomy defines and distinguishes between different levels of human cognition—i.e., thinking, learning, and understanding. Political scientists and other teachers from across the academy employ the taxonomy to explain their educational and assessment choices. We employ this taxonomy below.

Let’s say you are teaching Introduction to American Government in early September and want to create a take-home assignment assessing students’ understanding of the Declaration of Independence. What authentic assessments can you create using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide?

We view Bloom’s Taxonomy similar to American Federalism today, as a marble cake instead of a layer cake. A particular assignment may not fit nicely into one layer of Bloom’s but may cross over layers or even skip layers. Again, we encourage the reader to pause, think about Bloom’s Taxonomy and the example above, then devise a few assessment examples for various topics.

The Internet and our smartphones offer us the entirety of human history at our fingertips. If we ask an assessment question that Google can answer, a student can type in the question and get the answer. Moreover, with the advent of AI, students can even put in a prompt and have AI generate a novel answer. We must continually ask about our assessment choices and what we want students to learn from our assessments.

AI spotlights the need for us to ask why we assign what we assign and to explore multiple ways for students to demonstrate the knowledge and skills we seek in our assessments. We must remember that when our students leave us, AI will be there, better and stronger than ever. Publications are coming out every day about AI in the classroom. We are sure there will be many more in the coming months and years.

We acknowledge that many of our assessment examples can be answered by ChatGPT. However, utilizing ChatGPT in the classroom in conjunction with authentic assessments is powerful. For example, the instructor can break the class up into groups and give each of them the same “Create” prompt from above to put into ChatGPT. Then, students can reverse outline ChatGPT’s answer in each group and write what they gathered from it on the board. Then, the class, as a whole, can compare and contrast the different answers ChatGPT gave to each group. What did ChatGPT put in all of the answers? What did it only put in one answer? Did it capture the sentiment of what the students would have written? How would the American Revolution have turned out differently if this was the real answer given to the rebels? Moreover, students can create an alternate history with ChatGPT and extrapolate what might have happened to the formation of the American government in its early years.

Conclusion

Why should we care about active learning and authentic assessment in our classrooms? First, it promotes inclusivity. Active learning strategies, such as group discussions and peer teaching, can promote inclusivity by allowing students to share their experiences and perspectives. This creates a more diverse and inclusive learning environment. Second, it fosters critical thinking. Active learning encourages students to think critically about the topics discussed in the classroom. Authentic assessments, such as creating policy briefs or drawing gerrymandered maps, require students to apply critical thinking skills to real-world scenarios. Third, it builds skills for future careers. Most careers require strong communication, research, and analytical skills. Active learning and authentic assessment help students develop these skills and prepare them for future careers. Fourth, it addresses social justice issues: Active learning and authentic assessment allow students to explore these issues meaningfully, and develop solutions that address the root causes of social injustice. We hope you will try some of these strategies in your classroom soon!

Footnotes

[1] https://educate.apsanet.org/federalism-in-practice

[2] You can find more about this process online athttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1SnA4tXxDh4h_ls3ppaczjDADvUoJyWRQWRA3C73QmiM/edit?us p=sharing

[3]http://www.Monticello.org/declaration

References

Ambrose, Susan, Michael Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha Lovett, and Marie Norman. 2010. How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Armstrong, Patricia. 2010. “Bloom’s Taxonomy.” Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Retrieved May 16, 2023 (https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub- pages/blooms-taxonomy/).

Fink, L. Dee. 2013. Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Gonzales, Jennifer. 2018. “To Learn, Students Need to DO Something.” Cult of Pedagogy. Retrieved May 8, 2023 (https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/do- something/).

Lang, James. 2021. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass.

McManus, Mike, and Gary Taylor, editors. 2009. Active Learning and Active Citizenship: Theoretical Contexts. Birmingham: C-SAP, University of Birmingham.

Oakley, Barbara. 2014. A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra). New York, NY: Teacher Perigree.

Wiggins, Grant. 1998. Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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Nicholas Kapoor is an Instructor of Mathematics and Associate Director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Fairfield University.

 Carrie LeVan is the Montgoris Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College.

Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of the The Political Science Educator can be viewed on APSA Connects Civic Education page.

Editors: Colin Brown (Northeastern University), Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)

Submissions: editor.PSE.newsletter@gmail.com

APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Any questions or corrections to how the newsletter appears on Educate should be addressed to educate@apsanet.org

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