2023 Yidan Prize for Education Research

The challenge

Educators aim every day to help learners of all ages understand complex concepts. Increasingly, they have turned to “active learning” approaches, even though it is not always clear to educators what that precisely means. For example, what exactly constitutes active learning activities, why are some activities less effective than others — and how should active learning activities be designed or selected from the many choices available online? Arizona State University Regents Professor Michelene “Micki” Chi, who is a professor of Science and Teaching with ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, developed the ICAP framework to help answer these questions. ICAP is a widely recognized theory of cognitive engagement, however there is a need to scale this work and make it more accessible to educators nationally and globally.

The approach

Chi has been granted the Yidan Prize for Education Research Laureate 2023. The prize is an international honor recognizing her innovative approaches that help learners reach their full potential and break down barriers to higher education. Through the Yidan Prize funding, Chi will be able to expand ICAP research, develop training modules and workshops, and create a practical manual for instructional developers. The focus will be to scale ICAP's impact.

ICAP provides concrete definitions that more clearly differentiate “passive” from “active” instruction, compared to the  binary “active” and “passive” ways of designing instruction. It does this by expanding the “active” definition to three broad types of behavior mode. ICAP identifies the passive mode to when students are only paying attention and receiving information, such as watching a video or listening to a lecture, without doing anything else. ICAP then identifies these three kinds of active learning distinctions:

• Active mode refers to students selectively manipulating instructional materials without adding any other information, such as highlighting the key sentences or choosing an option among the ones provided.
• Constructive mode means that students are generating additional information beyond (i.e., not presented in) the learning materials, such as posing a question or diagramming a problem. 
• Interactive mode means that students are collaborating with a peer by co-generating, such as elaborating and building on each other’s inferences. One example includes debating with a peer or jointly writing a critique.

The ICAP hypothesis predicts that learning improves significantly from the passive, to the active, then the constructive and interactive modes (based on students’ thinking processes). ICAP provides a top-down theory that can provide theoretical predictions of hundreds of laboratory studies already published in the literature with a uniform and systematic explanation. ICAP also can categorize instructors’ actual teaching methods and lesson plans, and is adaptable for physical or online classrooms.