Learning by Doing: An Empirical Study of Active Teaching Techniques

The current study sought to examine the effectiveness of four teaching techniques (lec-ture, demonstrations, discussions, and in-class activities) in the classroom. As each tech-nique offers different benefits to the instructor and students, each technique was expected to aid in a different depth of learning. The current findings indicated that each teaching technique has its own unique benefits and is effective for various levels of learning. Ad-ditionally, our findings supported the notion that active techniques do aid in increasing learning. In-class activities led to higher overall scores than any other teaching method while lecture methods led to the lowest overall scores of any of the teaching methods. The implications for the classroom are discussed