Summary

Getting students to feel excited about their studies, see the real-world implications and engage with their learning can be challenging for educators. In response, educators are embracing active learning frameworks that emphasise practical and experiential processes (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Prince, 2004) to break free from rigid and complex ideas, and abstraction of theories. Active learning follows an aspect of constructivist learning philosophy which highlights that students build on existing knowledge and skills by doing something and reflecting upon their own experiences and interactions. Since this involves the use of their senses, experience and creation, it results in deeper and more meaningful learning. (Main, 2021; Misseyanni, 2018). ‘Active learning is a transformative process that brings together knowledge artifacts, learning contexts, humans, and social problems as well as challenges for the present and future of our societies.’ (Misseyanni et al, 2018., p. xviii). This case study discusses such an assessment in an undergraduate Economics course, which required students to work in groups, take photographs of their real-life encounters and explain some economic concepts through them, which we found to be effective in several ways.

Motivation

It is vital for students to learn many concepts before applying them to analyse real life situations. As teachers, we have observed students being unengaged and struggling with some theoretical concepts being taught in classrooms. One potential reason for students’ disengagement and struggles could be that the delivery of the core courses is too ‘classroom-based’, failing to engage and help them understand the concepts well. Usually, we relate real-world examples verbally to explain the concepts, or show photos during the lectures. Assessment questions would ask for a definition with an example, which students can just memorise from the lecture notes without really learning and understanding them deeply. Or, we might ask some problem-solving types of question about these concepts. When we reflect on our teaching practice and students’ experience, although real-world examples were used to explain the concepts in the classroom, these were still abstract for students.

Students needed to experience these concepts directly, get hands-on experience, understand the real-world relevance of what they learnt and be excited to learn. Experiential learning is very useful here, and we recognised that scaffolding students would be an important element of this experience. It is an important aspect of active learning to facilitate multisensory engagement to help students understand theoretical concepts (Bartle, 2015; Bayer & Finlay, 2022; Burch et al., 2019; Kolb, 2015; Kolb & Kolb, 2022; McLeod, 2025). While, Burch et al. (2019) provide strong empirical evidence of its effectiveness in achieving higher-level learning outcomes, Bartle (2015) highlights its benefits in promoting real-world engagement and lifelong learning.

A similar approach using ecopedagogy, which focuses on encouraging environmental awareness, real-world application, and reflective practices like field journaling (Bayer & Finlay, 2022) could be supportive. Further, foundational works by Kolb (2015) and Kolb & Kolb (2022) present experiential learning as transformative, offering practical insights into its application. McLeod (2025) has also explored Kolb’s learning styles and the broad potential of experiential learning.

The assessment

In order to integrate active learning through an experiential approach, we selected a Level 3 undergraduate course, Contemporary Topics in Economics, which is delivered to a small class. Unlike the large class students were accustomed to in the Level 2, this small class size provided us the opportunity to introduce a different type of active assessment for learning. The experience from this course can enable us to embed this idea into different types of courses including larger classes, given the learning benefits it affords.

Formative and summative assessments were designed to address the issues discussed in the previous section which motivated our case study. We chose related theoretical economic concepts which students find confusing – moral hazard and adverse selection, two aspects of asymmetric information. We explain these concepts briefly in the textbox below.

The lecturer would typically teach the theoretic concept and provide one or two real world examples for students to see the connection between theory and practice. In order to engage students actively and to reinforce the learning, students were given opportunities to interact with their peers during lectures through formative group assessments where they were allocated in small groups and had to come up with at least one real-world example that may explain the theoretic concepts. They were encouraged to do this to support not only their understanding of the theory but also to meet students to whom they had never spoken before. Motivating students at this stage to share their examples with the whole class can be challenging, as they may either lack confidence in speaking in front of everyone or believe their examples are not good enough. At this stage, the teacher’s role becomes crucial in helping students recognise the benefits of discussions with both peers and the teacher. Students were made aware of the summative assessment question from the outset, which was in line with the formative assessments, giving them ample opportunities to learn, understand, assimilate, discuss and practice.

All nine students in the class were asked to work in small groups of three, but only two groups participated in this exercise and consented to participate in the research. Ethics approval has been granted for this research. We used photographs only for students who agreed to the following: ‘I consent for the photographs from my assessment to be used anonymously for the research study.’ The tasks they were set to complete the assessment were:

• Explore their surroundings and identify instances that exemplify asymmetric information, adverse selection, and moral hazard.
• Capture photographs within their immediate environment, symbolizing the above economic concepts.
• Address potential solutions to alleviate the identified issues in each case.
• Present their work clearly in power point slides and oral presentation.

Group presentations for the summative assessments were for 10-15 minutes, including some time for questions. This assessment was worth 35% of the overall grade. Students worked in groups for several weeks to decide what real-life experiences can be used to explain these theoretic concepts, what photos to take, prepare the slides and how to present their work.

Student output

It is interesting that each group chose photos from different scenarios to explain these concepts. Since the other students were watching, this was an opportunity for students to learn from each other.

In Figure 1, we share some photos that students presented. For adverse selection, they showed photos of a dating app and golf course, where the app users and golf players respectively do not have the information about their potential dates and the golf course (hidden information). For moral hazard, they brought to light how student apartments could be taken for rent and then sublet without the knowledge of owners.

Students’ experience

Students responded well to this assessment and according to the feedback surveys, all of them liked the assessment design and agreed that it enabled them to understand economic concepts better.

These are two comments from students in each of the two groups:

I found the photo journaling assessment to be a really positive experience for several reasons. Firstly, it gave me the chance to combine creative expression with academic work. I enjoyed being able to tell a story through photos, which made the assignment feel more personal and engaging.

It allowed a level of creativity which there has not been room for in other university level assessments.

Benefits of this design

The assessment had several aspects that enabled students to actively participate, and develop skills using different sensors: listening, observing, doing (taking photos) and connecting things they notice outside with classroom discussions. Key features of this assessment design that are worth highlighting, including insights into active learning, are:

• Authentic experiences: Even though discussed in the classroom, students had to actively find real-life examples from their own experiences on a weekly basis, something that teachers perhaps cannot know because they are examples that the students encounter, thus making it even more relevant to the authentic experience.
• Peer learning and co-creation: This enables learning from peers through discussions and observing presentations of others.
• Self-reflection: When we give opportunities to students to learn from activities, it is important to provide dedicated time and structured questions for active reflection.
• Student engagement: The assessment requires students to be more alert to their environment in order to be able to think and apply economics to things they see and encounter all the time, resulting in active engagement.
• Experiential learning in an outdoor setting (ecopedagogy): This took economics out of the classroom and provided an experiential learning opportunity. Students got hands-on experience where they discussed, photo-journalled and reflected to examine their experiences using formative and summative assessments, which facilitated Kolb’s experiential learning cycle.
• Sensory-based learning: Along with experiential learning, this enables immersive and sensory exploration of the immediate environment where students could feel and smell the surroundings, see the objects and people, and hear what is happening around them. These could be powerful reminders of what they learnt and help them to remember the associated concepts.
• Graduate skills development: Students built oral and communication skills, team working and collaboration skills, digital and creative skills through photography and critical thinking.

While the small class size was useful for testing this assessment design for active learning, this very feature also presents a limitation, as we had a relatively limited set of student experiences to analyse. To strengthen the study, we could use this assessment design and run the survey across multiple years or pilot it in a course with a larger class size.

Key takeaways

The takeaway message from this case study can be encompassed in the following important areas.

• Adaptability: For all students to engage, we must focus on topics that students personally encounter and that are of current interest when designing the assessment and course content. In this case, we have shown the importance of setting tasks that require students to go outside the classroom or library setting and beyond books. Staff and students must be able to adapt and change their plans based on conditions, availability and interest.
• Transferability: When designing such an assessment, we must consider whether the skills they learn in such an activity will develop graduate skills such as working in teams, observation/noticing, applying subject concepts to analyse and finding solutions, presentations, and so on.
• Inclusivity: It is important that all activities and technology are inclusive and accessible (e.g. take photos without having to go on expensive trips). In order to ensure all students make use of this opportunity, it is better to have this as a summative assessment to ensure students engage but are aided by a formative assessment with clear instructions to scaffold them.

Concluding remarks

This assessment design delivers some of the important outcomes of a multimodal approach, enabling experiential learning so that students with different types of learning preferences could all engage. The experience facilitates deep learning because they go out and do activities together and discuss. In our case, it led students to be more engaged and motivated. Most importantly, students highlighted that the assessment facilitated and enhanced creative engagement with the task. Student feedback for the course has been excellent, and we are thinking of introducing such an assessment in larger courses.

References

Bartle, E. (2015). Experiential learning: an overview [discussion paper]. Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation, The University of Queensland. https://itali.uq.edu.au/files/1264/Discussion-paper-Experiential_learning_an_overview.pdf___.YzJlOmFiZXJ0YXl1bml2ZXJzaXR5OmM6bzowZWM0NjQxNWY3OGEyZDMwNWMxZDcwNGFjMzVjYzVmNjo3OmQwODE6MWM0MGIzOWExNzhhNmJjZTE1OTNjMmVjYjFjZTQzMzI3YWMyNWFkN2VhNDRlNjZkMGM3N2U4ZWU0YTc2MGI3ZTpwOlQ6Tg

Bayer, E., & Finley, J. B. (Eds.). (2022). Ecopedagogies: Practical Approaches to Experiential Learning. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003221807

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active learning: Creating excitement in the classroom. 1991 ASHE-ERIC higher education reports. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, The George Washington University, One Dupont Circle, Suite 630, Washington, DC 20036-1183.  https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED336049

Burch, G. F., Giambatista, R., Batchelor, J.H., Burch, J. J., Hoover, J. D., & Heller, N. A. (2019). A meta-analysis of the relationship between experiential learning and learning outcomes. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 17 (3), 239-273, http://doi.org/10.1111/dsji.12188

Kolb, D. (2015). Experiential Learning: Experience as the source of Learning and Development. (2nd ed). Pearson FT Press.  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315793484_Experiential_Learning_Experience_as_the_source_of_Learning_and_Development_Second_Edition#fullTextFileContent

Kolb, A. Y., & Kolb, D. A. (2022). Experiential Learning Theory as a Guide for Experiential Educators in Higher Education. Experiential Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 38. https://doi.org/10.46787/elthe.v1i1.3362

McLeod, S. A. (2025, March 19). Kolb’s learning styles & experiential learning cycle. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/learning-kolb.html

Main, P. (2021). Embracing the learning theory: constructivism. Structural Learning.  https://www.structural-learning.com/post/embracing-the-learning-theory-constructivism

Misseyanni, A., Lytras, M. D., Papadopoulou, P., & Marouli, C. (Eds.). (2018). Active learning strategies in higher education: Teaching for leadership, innovation, and creativity. Emerald. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324015375_Active_Learning_Strategies_in_Higher_Education_Teaching_for_Leadership_Innovation_and_Creativity

Prince, M. (2004). Does active learning work? A review of the research. Journal of engineering education, 93(3), 223-231. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2168-9830.2004.tb00809.x

About the authors

Dr. Lovleen Kushwah, Senior Lecturer in Economics and Integrative Psychotherapist, and Dr. Geethanjali Selvaretnam, Professor of Economics, are committed to advancing SoTL. Their shared interests include embedding wellbeing in the curriculum, ESD, collaborative learning, and fostering inner feedback generation.

Corresponding Author: Lovleen Kushwah, Lovleen.Kushwah@glasgow.ac.uk