Instructors' Attitudes toward Active Learning

One of the major goals of science and technology education today is to promote students' active learning as a way to improve students' conceptual understanding and thinking skills. Although there is clear evidence for the benefits of active learning, most lecturers in higher education still adhere to traditional teaching methods. This research seeks to identify the characteristic attitudes of “active instructors” towards active learning and discerning a distinction between these attitudes and those of the remaining instructors. This study examined the attitudes of 153 lecturers in three higher education institutions in Israel. The research tool was an attitude questionnaire developed specially for this study on the basis of the experience of 7 “active instructors” exposing the process of change they had undergone moving from traditional teaching to more active instruction. An analysis of these interviews provided the basis for characterizing the attitudes of "active instructors" and subsequently for the development of the research questionnaire. On the basis of a literature review and an examination of the attitudes of the “active instructors,” a content analysis was undertaken in which the attitudes were grouped into six key domains that can characterize the tendency of a lecturer to adopt active teaching. The findings reveal that in all these 6 domains there were significant differences between the attitudes of "active instructors" and their colleagues. This diagnostic tool can supply crucial information to the college and universities directors when planning supportive steps toward advancing active learning in their institutions.