Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There has been little cross-fertilization between research on ac-tive learning and teaching, despite extensive conceptual simi-larities. The current study aims to bridge the gap by show-ing that engaging in active learning can influence subsequentteaching performance. In a one-dimensional boundary teach-ing task, participants who first took the role of an active learnerwent on to become better teachers than participants who didnot. In order to disentangle the effect of active selection ofsamples from their information content, the performance ofactive learners was compared to that of yoked passive learn-ers. While prior passive learning also significantly boostedteaching performance, it did so to a lesser extent. However, inpaired comparisons, teachers with active learning experiencedid not differ significantly from their yoked-passive learningcounterparts. Based on the current results we cannot arguefor a teaching benefit specific to active learning as opposed toa more general improvement caused by experiencing the taskfrom the learner’s perspective. However, we suggest that thisis a promising line of inquiry using more complex learning andteaching tasks.