Active versus passive learning

Active learning shows better results than passive learning. Why? It is assumed that learning knows multiple coding mechanisms and that active learning uses a more elaborative coding. But again why? Why should the brain worsely save the perceptions that are formed without the active direction of the subject?

I notice the effect in learning foreign languages. If I look up the meaning of a word in a dictionary, I often have lost it the next time I see the same word. “I know I looked it up, but what did it mean?” If I conclude the meaning of an unknown word from the context, then I’ll remember it. We tend to look at the memory as a storage of knowledge, but this approach does not explain why I keep in memory the one thing and don’t keep the other.

It is in the behaviour that we examine the memory. Behaviour is the only phenomenon we can use for examing the memory. When you ask a subject to remember something and he or she tells you, this is behaviour. When you remember something, this is mental behaviour. As I stated in the article Memory, I think the memory consists out of saved behaviour. In this I have an explanation for the phenomenon that active learning scores higher. Regard the next example.

If I look up a word in a dictionary, I practice the searching of that word. This is a behaviour leading to knowledge about the meaning of the word. Next time when I’ll look up this or another word, I’ll get it faster, because I’ll be more practiced. Unfortunately it’s a behaviour I can’t do without the aid of the dictionary. Compare this to the alternative behaviour: concluding the meaning of a word from the context. With this I practice the concluding from the context. This behaviour leads to knowledge of the meaning of the word too. And this behaviour will be faster too when I’ll meet this or another word next time. This behaviour I can perform without aid. Conclusively: next time I get to know the meaning faster, so I remembered it better.

This effect appears most clearly when you read one chapter in a foreign language twice. When your approach is to look it up, second time you might think “I know I looked it up, but what did it mean?” and you need to look it up again. When your approach is to conclude the meaning from the context, you might think for a moment “What did it mean?”, but sequentially you’ll conlude the meaning faster than the first time. 
Behaviour is saved in memory. So with active learning something different is saved then with passive learning and therefor active learning scores better.

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