Effectiveness of active learning for ecology teaching: the perspective of students vs their grades

We evaluated the effectiveness of active learning for ecology teaching by comparing the perspective of students to their grades in exams. We estimated the perspective of the students through anonymous survey; we used students’ exam grades to estimate their ecology learning, and their effort and performance in the active learning tasks through their grades and proportion of intermediate steps for each active learning task. Active learning involved teachers’ stimuli for students’ active involvement, extra-class group task, individual online writing assessments, redoing exam in pairs, and classroom writing group assessments. We also evaluated the impact, unto the effectiveness of active learning, of several student characteristics, such as sex, age, individual study effort, and previous basic knowledge. We found that self-evaluated learning increased linearly with teachers’ attempts to stimulate students’ active involvement (P = 0.0003), extra-class group task (P = 0.0003), and previous basic knowledge (P = 0.02), while students’ grades increased asymptotically with extra-class group task (P < 2−16), and increased linearly with online writing assessments (P = 9.3−8) and classroom-based writing group assessments (P = 0.03). Our results showed that students perceive most part of the effectiveness of active-learning tasks and of teachers’ efforts. We showed that active learning tasks are complementary, so we recommend that teachers in both college and high school should implement simultaneous active-learning tasks, that include extra-class work in group, individual and group writing assessments, and should stimulate students’ engagement through respectful and non-authoritarian behavior of the teacher. Our results also showed that previous basic knowledge also plays a central role in driving effective learning, evidencing the importance of students instruction outside college. The applied teaching methodology is cheap and feasible for large classes. In these times of rising intolerance, prejudice, dismiss of environmental issues and disregard of science itself, we need an effective, pluralistic, respectful, and student-centred education, that fosters critical thinking, tolerance and respect for differing points of view.