9 General introduction faculty development initiatives, I would often introduce this strategy to participating teachers. After discussing the concept, suggesting learning activities, and allowing teachers to experience active learning within the meetings, they typically decided to incorporate active learning into their own teaching. In subsequent meetings, teachers would share experiences and many reported clear improvements in student participation, as well as increased enjoyment of their teaching. However, this was not always the case. Despite adhering to recommended practices and repeated attempts, some teachers found that their students remained passive and detached from the learning process. As a result, the teachers felt that they had little choice but to fall back on familiar teaching and learning strategies that did not require interaction, such as lecturing. These contrasting experiences of teachers triggered memories of my personal experiences and reignited my curiosity: what factors contribute to some teachers successfully adopting active learning and engaging students, while others encounter such difficulties? As a faculty developer, I was familiar with various facilitators and barriers that impact active learning, such as the influence of assessment methods, time constraints, group size, student resistance to active participation, class planning, and classroom infrastructure. Still, this knowledge did not provide sufficient answers to my questions or aid the teachers in my faculty development initiatives. This gap prompted me to delve deeper into this matter. Consequently, this thesis represents a means to offer more effective support to the teachers I work with. Introducing active learning and student engagement Active learning is an educational concept describing the process of students actively engaging with study materials through learning activities, and teachers serving as facilitators in the learning process by guiding students as they learn, practice, apply, and evaluate the subject matter (9–12). It is often positioned as the opposite of traditional or passive learning, where students mainly listen to an expert telling them what they should know. Underlying active learning is a constructivist theory of learning, which proposes that learning is an active process that requires learners to construct their own understanding (13,14). Students are not empty buckets to be filled with knowledge but are actively making sense of new information by relating it to prior knowledge and experiences (15). Reviews and meta-analyses on active learning in various fields demonstrate its superior effectiveness on student learning, compared to passive learning (11,16–18). Furthermore, the use of active learning has also been linked to outcomes such as enhanced student motivation, lower student dropout, shorter study duration, and more equitable outcomes for students from disadvantaged backgrounds (7,19–23). A critical factor that directly influences the effectiveness of active learning is student engagement (1–3,24). Student engagement refers to the participation or involvement of students in a learning process. It is often conceptualized as a multidimensional construct, encompassing cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components (1,25). The cognitive 1
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