Giving Compass' Take:

• Brookings Institution discusses hands-on learning and why engaging students in activities surrounding the topic are more effective than speaking at them.

• As you explore what makes hands-on, project-based learning so effective, it's worth thinking about how nonprofits can use case studies and data sets in this realm to inform future initiatives.

• When student know why they're learning, and the meaning behind lessons, they are more likely to retain information.

A 3-year-old sits on the carpet of her preschool classroom building a castle out of wooden blocks—exercising her spatial skills and learning the basic physics concepts of stability and balance. Meanwhile, an undergraduate is building a suspension bridge out of toothpicks and string in her civil engineering course. These students are both engaged in hands-on minds-on learning and are much more likely to retain the content than their peers who were talked at or lectured to. Irrespective of age, people learn best when learning experiences are active, engaged, meaningful, and interactive.

Professor Noah Finklestein, of the Physics Department at the University of Colorado, is working with his colleagues to transform the approach to educating undergraduates. Research suggests that undergrads learn less than 25 percent of basic concepts that they did not already know in introductory physics courses, and they do not see the relevance of the content to their lives. In a move away from the classic lecture format, Dr. Finklestein is using an “interactive-engagement” approach where students work in small groups and apply the content in computer simulations and hands-on activities. The data show that student-learning outcomes of the most seasoned lecturers are equal to the lowest performing interactive-engagement classrooms, and when done well, the interactive-engagement format vastly outperforms the top lecturers with students learning more than double the physics content.

Read the full article about engaged learning by Andres S. Bustamante and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek at Brookings Institution.