The amount of active participation in the learning process is an excellent index of the quality of instruction for the purpose of predicting or accounting for individual learning.
– Benjamin Bloom

We believe that when students are actively engaged in their learning, performance is improved. Active engagement, as we propose to use the term, connotes students continually processing and internalizing information and then making appropriate application. The teacher's role in promoting active engagement is not only to engineer the environment to maximize learning opportunities for students, but also to mediate-that is, to respond to students in ways that will help them give meaning to those opportunities and to develop thought processes which will allow them to learn independently. When learning is passive, the learner comes to the encounter without curiosity, without questions, and without interest in the outcome. When learning is active, the learner is seeking something. She wants an answer to a question, needs information to solve a problem, or is searching for a way to do a job.

In a study done by Csikszentmihalyi et al. (1993), researchers equipped high school students with beepers and told them they would be beeped randomly throughout the school day. When they heard the beep, the students were asked to stop and write down whatever was going on in their minds at the time. The researchers beeped 28 students who were listening to a Chinese history lesson about Genghis Khan's invasion of China in the 12th century. Only two students were thinking about China: one was thinking about what he'd had at a Chinese restaurant two weeks before and the other was wondering why Chinese men in the 12th century wore their hair in ponytails! Essentially, no one was thinking about the lesson or using their natural genius to engage with its content.

In another interesting study Meyers and Jones (1997) reported several disturbing discoveries: that while teachers are lecturing, students were not attending to what was being said 40 percent of the time; in the first ten minutes of lecture, students retain 70 percent of the information, in the last 10 minutes, 20 percent; students lose their initial interest, and attention levels continue to drop, as a lecture proceeds; and four months after taking an introductory psychology course, students knew only 8 percent more than a control group who had never taken the course. The problem is not that teachers talk; it's that they talk too much. A time comes when everyone needs to speak in order to clarify what she has heard, read, observed, or experienced. The fact is, we often do not know what we think until we try to say it. The social transmission of knowledge, which takes place when students interact with each other and test their ideas against those of their peers, is one of the most powerful forces in expanding students thinking.