There is a certain irony in the article and study I want to discuss with you today. I had to think pretty hard to understand it. No, really, this study by Sergiou and colleagues has proven to be an incredibly difficult read. However, it addresses something essential in the ongoing discussion of active and passive learning.

A good teacher does not simply ask students to give answers. Hopefully, the teacher also asks them to explain why an answer is correct. Or asks them to explore different solutions, apply their knowledge in new situations, or consider problems whose solutions are not immediately obvious. In this and other research, reseachers call this cognitive activation. It may sound rather technical, but the idea behind it is quite simple. Education should make students think.

But does it? Well, that is precisely where we encounter a problem. As a teacher, you can ask a wonderful question that invites students to think deeply. However, that does not mean that every student will actually do so. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

After reading for quite a while, I realised that this distinction is precisely what lies at the heart of this study by Sergiou and colleagues. More specifically, they distinguish between:

• the opportunity for cognitive activation
• students’ actual use of that opportunity.

Or, more simply: between being given an opportunity to think and actually thinking.

Let’s make this more concrete. Imagine a teacher gives students a difficult maths problem and asks them to come up with different solution strategies and compare them. From the teacher’s perspective, a nice opportunity for cognitive activation, aka thinking, has been created.

But students’ responses can differ quite dramatically. Student A genuinely tries out different solutions and thinks about why they work. Student B finds one solution and leaves it at that. Then there is Student C, who waits for someone else to give the answer, while Student D is daydreaming anyway.

The opportunity to think is more or less the same for all these students. However, it is the use of that opportunity that differs.

According to the authors, previous research has mainly looked at the first part: to what extent does teaching create opportunities to challenge students cognitively? Far less research has simultaneously examined what students then actually do with those opportunities. And the findings from previous research on cognitive activation have been rather mixed, so… enter this new study.

The researchers followed 542 students, with an average age of around eleven, in 31 classrooms in Cyprus. All teachers taught the same three algebra lessons from the national textbook. The researchers videotaped these 93 lessons and trained observers assessed them. Meanwhile, the students also completed questionnaires.

So, what did they find? What the teacher does matters.

You might have thought that, in the end, only what the student actually does really counts, as the proverb above suggests. A teacher can offer all sorts of wonderful opportunities. Nevertheless, if the student does not take them up, they are of little use.

The researchers therefore actually expected a stronger association between students’ cognitive activity and the outcomes. This would be stronger than the opportunities created by the teacher.

But that was not the case! More than that, the expert observers’ assessment of the opportunities for cognitive activation during the lessons was the strongest and most consistent predictor.

For algebra, the researchers found a fairly strong association of β = .45. For interest in mathematics, they found an association of β = .48. The differences between classrooms were particularly striking. Expert ratings of cognitive activation explained around 18 per cent of the between-classroom differences in algebra performance. This was over and above the variables the researchers had already controlled for.

There was also an association between students’ own ratings and their performance, but much less strongly. At the individual level, students’ perceptions of the cognitive activation offered were associated with algebra performance at β = .10. On the other hand, the cognitive activity students themselves reported showed an association of β = .13.

The researchers therefore found no evidence for their expectation that students’ actual use of the opportunities would matter more than the opportunities themselves. In the full model, the external experts’ ratings even performed significantly better than the measures of students’ cognitive activity.

Of course, this does not mean that it is enough for a teacher simply to throw difficult tasks at a class and hope for the best.

But… and I am ending on a cliffhanger here… there is a second part to this story. And that is for tomorrow.