According to an American study from academics at the Universities of Washington and Maine, “students in classes with traditional lecturing [were] 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning.”

The study, a result of the analysis of 255 published and unpublished studies about undergraduate teaching methods in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine.

While the methods of active learning studied vary, they include: giving students technology to answer questions mid-lecture, getting students to explain concepts to each other and calling on random students for answers.