What sort of instructional activities and methods promote meaningful learning?
Examples of activities that engage students meaningfully include solving a problem, completing an exercise, discussing and debating, and sharing written understandings or conceptual mappings of the content. In educational literature, the term for these types of activities is “active learning strategies” (Bonwell & Eison, 1991). Any of these activities can be incorporated into the lecture method of teaching and will increase the chance of students learning at a deep level. We get the best results when combining active learning strategies with a teaching method that rests on an underlying principle of student engagement. Learning outcomes for such teaching methods include information seeking skills (Duch, Groh, & Allen, 2001), application of knowledge (Albanese & Mitchell, 1993; Johnson & Johnson, 1994); idea generation and high level reasoning (Johnson & Johnson, 1994), acceptance of others different from oneself (Johnson & Johnson, 1989; Johnson et al., 1983); perspective-taking (Johns
