Cao 1

Nancy Cao
Professor Masulit
Ethnic Studies 21
1 October 2016
James Twinning
In James Twinning's article "Active Learning," he emphasizes the term active learning
throughout the article stating that students that are active learners will be more successful. Active
learning is when you are engaged with your reading assignments instead of reading it and later
forgetting what you read. This may suggest that you're actively taking notes while reading or
annotating the text. Most people do not take notes correctly. Many students simply copy
sentences from a page and claim that is proper note-taking, but instead they should rephrase main
points into their own words to get a better understanding. Active learning is very effective and
beneficial to learning and retaining new information.
I used to hate English class when I was younger because I hated to read in general. I
would read for an assignment, but immediately forget what I read. This was frustrating and I did
not understand why I would forget so easily. Later, I was taught active learning my freshman
year of high school in a class called Academic Literacy. That class taught me how to annotate
texts and how to properly read texts in order to get the full understanding. I used to read and
forget what I read immediately after I read it. Now, I am a better student and I naturally annotate
texts whenever I am assigned readings. Active learning is proven to be very beneficial to learning
and retaining knowledge.