From Passive to Interactive Learners: How the ICAP Framework Frames Active Learning through Technology

What is ICAP

The ICAP framework categorizes cognitive learning engagement into four modes:

1. Passive (P) – Students receive information but do not engage with it, often exhibited through simple listening or reading.
2. Active (A) – Students engage with the material through activities such as underlining text or taking notes but do not add any novel information.
3. Constructive (C) – Students go beyond the given information to construct new knowledge, often through activities like summarizing, explaining, or teaching.
4. Interactive (I) – Students participate in collaborative learning activities during which they co-construct knowledge by debating, arguing, and problem-solving with peers.

The framework presents activities or overt behaviors that can engage learners in more active learning to promote deeper cognitive engagement. Cognitive engagement is the extent to which students are willing and able to take on the learning task at hand. This includes the amount of effort students are willing to invest in working on the task (Corno and Mandinach 1983), and how long they persist. Examples of such behaviors include listening to a lecture (passive), writing notes on what is observed during a live or recorded lecture (active), drawing diagrams to map new concepts (constructive), or conversing with peers through group work to cocreate knowledge (interactive).

How ICAP Relates Bloom’s Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of the different outcomes and skills that educators set for their students (learning outcomes). The taxonomy was proposed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago. The taxonomy’s 6 levels can be used to structure the learning outcomes, lessons, and assessments of your online course:

1. Remembering: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling relevant knowledge from long‐term memory.
2. Understanding: Constructing meaning from oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting, exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring, comparing, and explaining.
3. Applying: Carrying out or using a procedure for executing, or implementing.
4. Analyzing: Breaking material into constituent parts, determining how the parts relate to one another and to an overall structure or purpose through differentiating, organizing, and attributing.
5. Evaluating: Making judgments based on criteria and standards through checking and critiquing.
6. Creating: Putting elements together to form a coherent or functional whole; reorganizing elements into a new pattern or structure through generating, planning, or producing.

While distinct, ICAP and Bloom’s are complementary theoretical frameworks. Both aim to enhance instructional design, educational assessment, and learning outcomes, but they operate on somewhat different premises and dimensions. Both frameworks deal with the complexity of cognitive engagement, though Bloom’s Taxonomy presents a hierarchical model of cognitive skills, whereas ICAP focuses on types of activities and interactions.

Bloom’s Taxonomy categorizes cognitive learning objectives into six hierarchical levels and aims to explain the process of learning using this underlying concept: Before you can understand a concept, you must remember it. To apply a concept, you must first understand it. In order to evaluate a process, you must have analyzed it. It’s about what level of cognition your students are ready for with the specific content in question, while ICAP is about driving that cognition home with more interactive activities.

Whether you use ICAP, Bloom’s or both to support instructional design and your learning outcomes, it’s important to recognize that both frameworks are hierarchical, meaning that learning at higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels, as well as these other points of intersection:

1. Interactive Learning: The interactive mode of ICAP relates closely to the higher-order cognitive skills of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation), where collaboration can enhance complex reasoning and problem-solving skills.
2. Constructive Learning: The constructive mode in ICAP can be mapped to the ‘Application’ and ‘Analysis’ levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, where learners need to assimilate new information and relate it to existing knowledge structures.
3. Active and Passive Learning: The passive and active modes in ICAP largely align with the lower levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy (Knowledge and Comprehension), focusing more on information acquisition and simple manipulations of it.
4. Instructional Design: Both frameworks offer pedagogical insights for crafting effective educational activities. For instance, one could design a learning experience that progresses from passive modes of engagement (P) to higher-order thinking skills (Evaluation) as laid out in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

In the end, ICAP and Bloom’s can be integrated into a holistic pedagogical strategy. Utilizing both frameworks and the right technology can help you optimize cognitive engagement, scaffold learning activities effectively, and establish comprehensive learning objectives. So let’s dive into some of the ways to do that.

How to Use Online Learning Activities to Scaffold Student Learning

The ICAP framework shows that as students become more engaged with the learning materials — from passive to active and then from constructive to interactive — their learning will increase. Here, we’ll focus on a handful of specific online engagement activities: reading assignments, watching and using multimedia, such as video, and participating in online course discussions, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a host of learning activities that can be used in your online courses to move students from passive into active and constructive into interactive learning:

The ICAP Framework at a Glance

Adapted from Chi and Wylie (2014)

Online Course Activity: Reading Assignments

Let’s say, you assign students a 25-page PDF reading assignment. Reading this PDF is an exercise that can span the spectrum of cognitive engagement.

Passive 

• Simple Reading: Merely reading the text without taking notes or reflecting upon the content.
• Skimming: Quickly scanning through the PDF to get a general sense of the material.
• Listening: If the PDF content is also available in audio format, students could simply listen to it.

In these passive activities, students are exposed to the information but don’t engage with it beyond basic absorption.

Active

• Highlighting Text: Using a PDF editor to highlight key phrases or sentences.
• Copy & Pasting: Copying and saving essential snippets for later reference.
• Reading Aloud: Verbally articulating the text, which can reinforce memory.

Although active and moving beyond the more passive activities, these tasks do not involve an internal manipulation or elaboration of the content to produce something new or personally meaningful.

Constructive

• Annotating: Writing personal reflections, explanations, or critical comments in the margins.
• Summarizing: Writing a brief summary of each section or chapter.
• Questioning: Posing questions in the margins that may be addressed by the text or require further investigation.

These activities compel students to go beyond the text and construct a new understanding or insights, thereby engaging them at a deeper cognitive level.

Interactive 

• Peer Discussion: After reading the PDF, discussing its content with a peer to deepen understanding.
• Online Discussion Forums: Engaging in an online discussion to clarify, highlight, and debate the points or perspective presented in the PDF.
• Collaborative Annotation: Using a tool that allows for shared annotations and comments on the PDF, thereby benefiting from multiple perspectives.

Interactive activities involve co-construction of knowledge, which requires the highest level of cognitive engagement according to the ICAP framework. This approach can be further enriched when combined with Bloom’s Taxonomy. For instance, Interactive and Constructive activities align well with higher-order cognitive skills like Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation, thereby offering not just comprehension but also critical engagement with the material. Active and Passive activities serve as foundational steps that correspond to Knowledge and Comprehension in Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Enable Deeper Engagement During Reading with Harmonize: Peer review & collaboration activities 

When it comes to reading assignments like this, Harmonize encourages meaningful  student-to-student, student-to-content, and student-to-instruction interactions.

For example, tools in Harmonize that enable peer review, small group, and other unique online collaboration activities can lead to deeper interaction among students and with instructors. Instructors and students can use Q&A boards for asynchronous communication and built-in text-like chats for real-time communication to exchange information based on the readings; students can flag questions for instructors to respond and provide additional feedback on; and instructors can create polls to ask students for collective feedback that can be used to inform future instruction.

Perhaps most interactive, students and instructors can annotate those reading assignments, using text or a variety of multimedia. Social annotation on reading assignments enable students to dynamically share ideas about course material, add their thoughts directly into a piece of content, or easily provide feedback to other students on their work.

Pulling on multiple levers to interact with students or that enable students to interact with one another in online courses creates multiple pathways for interaction and is an effective way to ensure students have the information and responses they need to move forward in their coursework. Students will feel heard and seen, keeping them motivated and engaged to learn more.

Online Course Activity: Video

By now, most recognize that incorporating multimedia into your online course is a must for engaging students, and video is one of the most effective ways to do this. Maybe you prepared a video showing your online lab chem students how to walk through a particular experiment or you shared a video with students to supplement their reading and provide a real-world application. Similar to the reading assignment, watching a video can be aligned with the ICAP framework.

Passive

• Viewing: Simply watching the video from start to finish without any additional actions or reflections.
• Repeated Viewing: Watching the video more than once, but without engaging further with the content.

In both cases, learners are exposed to the information but do not actively engage with it beyond basic absorption.

Active

• Pausing & Rewinding: Stopping the video at specific points to review important details.
• Transcribing: Taking verbatim notes or writing down phrases or sentences directly from the video’s narration or slides.
• Clicking Links: If the video includes embedded links for additional resources, clicking them could be considered an active engagement, though only marginally so.

These activities involve a certain level of engagement but do not significantly require the viewer to elaborate upon the content in a new or constructive manner.

Constructive

• Summarizing: Writing a summary that captures the main points, arguments, or findings of the video.
• Reflecting: Pausing the video at intervals to reflect on how the information relates to prior knowledge or how it could be applied in different contexts.
• Asking Questions: Formulating questions based on the content, which could guide further research or study.

These constructive activities demand a deeper cognitive engagement with the material, requiring the viewer to process and integrate the content into their existing knowledge structures.

Interactive

• Group Discussion: Watching the video as part of a study group and then discussing its content, interpretations, and implications.
• Social Media Forums: Engaging with other viewers in online discussions or debates concerning the video’s content.
• Quizzes or Interactive Segments: Some educational videos include embedded quizzes or activities that require interaction either with the content or with other viewers.

These interactive modes of engagement imply a co-construction of knowledge and an in-depth cognitive involvement, in line with the highest levels of engagement in the ICAP framework.

Again, the I and C levels of engagement align well with higher-order cognitive skills like Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation in Bloom’s Taxonomy. These activities not only facilitate comprehension but also encourage critical thinking and the application of knowledge. In contrast, the A and P engagements are more foundational and correspond to the Knowledge and Comprehension levels in Bloom’s framework.

Enable Deeper Engagement with Multimedia with Harmonize: Help learners connect, communicate, and build community through video

With rich multimedia, including video, image, and audio capabilities in Harmonize, you can encourage students to engage with videos, both watching and creating. Instructors can also quickly create and post a video introduction, as well as ongoing reminders that state expectations for how and when students should interact with you and classmates. They can also create or share videos, simulations, case studies, images, gifs, and any other media to explain course concepts. Plus, with social-media inspired discussion boards for sharing media, students can react, comment, and interact with everyone else’s videos. With this approach, you’ll see participation increase, levels of engagement deepen as the course progresses, and a sense of community begin to develop in your online course.

Just as important as the instructor’s use of media, be sure to encourage students to create and submit assignments and make contributions using a variety of Harmonize’s multimedia options, from images and video with annotation to text and audio snippets, as well as auto-captioning and polls. Mobile-first and available 24/7 on any device offers students a choice in how and when they complete an assignment. And asking them to find their own content in a way that fits your parameters gives students a broader range of expression and supports a more inclusive approach to learning, which spurs participation. You’ll also be able to better structure learning experiences and assessments around video content, ensuring both depth and breadth in cognitive engagement.

Online Learning Activity: Online Course Discussions

Online discussions can take many forms: instructor-led, student-led, small-group, or student-to-student. You can also define the interaction strategy you want your students to take, explaining or debating for example. Assigning students to engage in an online discussion can manifest various levels of cognitive activity. Below are some representative activities that align with each mode within the ICAP paradigm.

Passive

• Lurking: Merely reading through posts and comments without contributing to the discussion.
• Reviewing Notifications: Receiving updates about the discussion or a particular thread without actively participating.

While these activities involve exposure to the discussion’s content, there is no active engagement or construction of new knowledge.

Active

• Upvoting or Downvoting: Interacting with the posts by voting, which involves a basic level of processing but doesn’t add new information.
• Bookmarking: Saving specific threads or comments for future reference, again, without contributing new content.
• Sharing Links: Circulating existing posts or threads via social media or other channels without adding personal insights.

These activities indicate a higher level of engagement than passive modes, but they still do not involve any significant elaboration or generation of new content.

Constructive

• Posting Summaries: Summarizing long threads or complex posts to facilitate easier consumption and understanding for others.
• Answering Questions: Providing detailed answers to questions posed in the forum, based on personal understanding or research.
• Raising New Questions: Initiating new threads that require deeper consideration and invite further discussion.

Constructive activities entail generating and presenting new insights, knowledge, or perspectives, which requires a higher degree of cognitive engagement.

Interactive

• Debate: Actively engaging with others by challenging their viewpoints, crafting arguments and counterarguments, or asking follow-up questions.
• Collaborative Problem-Solving: Working together to solve a complex issue or task.
• Peer Feedback: Providing detailed critiques or evaluations of others’ posts, encouraging a back-and-forth dialogue.

Interactive engagement is characterized by the co-construction of knowledge and represents the highest level of cognitive involvement according to the ICAP framework.

As expected, the I and C activities align with the higher cognitive processes of Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation in Bloom’s Taxonomy. These activities demand critical thinking and the ability to integrate and apply knowledge creatively. Conversely, A and P engagements serve foundational roles, correlating with Bloom’s Knowledge and Comprehension levels.

Enable Deeper Engagement in Discussions with Harmonize: Increase and improve the quality of student interactions

At the heart of Harmonize is its ability to drive online discussions — and to keep students coming back to the conversation. With an array of powerful tools, instructors have the flexibility and control to provide socially engaging, instructor- or student-facilitated discussions and the kinds of dynamic interactions that won’t end up lost in a hundred different threads. That’s because its social media-like interface is modern, intuitive, and familiar to students — which means it draws students in.

You know as well as anyone that students will engage only at levels they’re comfortable with, and it’s generally the most outgoing students who speak up. This leaves a lot of shy or struggling students behind. When in a physical classroom, it’s easier to spot and re-engage those students. In Harmonize discussions, you can allow students to post anonymously when appropriate, use a variety of multimedia like video and images, share reactions, and you can tag students in order to coax them back into the fold.

You can also use milestones — or multiple due dates — in Harmonize to set clear expectations for when and how often students should be interacting, which serves to guide students. Further, with ChatGPT built into Harmonize, you can more quickly and easily scale engaging course discussions across sections and courses. You can even assign discussions of varying complexity based on different levels of student learning across the class — that’s truly personalized learning.

Imagine if all you had to do was click a few buttons and suddenly you have more sound pedagogy in ALL of your discussions? If students were guided to discuss topics with an interaction strategy that is relevant to their course level — just think how that would impact engagement. Harmonize leveraged its knowledge of quality online education pedagogy to coach ChatGPT to build better course discussion and assignment prompts, so that educators and instructional designers can boost student engagement with every single discussion. You’re able to focus on the higher level needs of the courses and use ChatGPT in Harmonize to fill in the work of generating prompts for you — at scale across multiple lessons, courses, and instructors.

When you facilitate online discussions this way, you’re helping students collaborate and share their diversity of thought, as well as promoting an inclusive approach to learning and creating a sense of community — and that’s huge when it comes to fostering better interactions and deeper cognitive engagement online.

The strategic use of online discussions can be a valuable tool for achieving diverse learning objectives. You can design and scaffold these activities in such a way as to guide students through varying levels of cognitive engagement, fulfilling both foundational and advanced educational outcomes.

Using Harmonize to Move from Passive to Active & Constructive to Interactive Online Learning

In the end, an online course that supports each mode of cognitive engagement and moves students up from passive to more active and constructive to more interactive methods of learning is the key to student growth — and for good reason.

• Students who are highly and deeply engaged in their work are 1.5 times more likely to complete a degree (Svanum and Bigatti, 2009).
• Engaged students, on average, require one fewer semester to complete their degree (Svanum and Bigatti, 2009).
• Students who actively participate are more motivated (Frisby & Myers, 2008; Junn, 1994), engage in more critical thinking (Garside, 1996), and show improvement in communication skills   (Dancer & Kamvounias, 2005).

When designing online courses, choose activities that move beyond supporting passive and active learning to those that are considered more constructive and interactive. You can design and scaffold online discussion activities and collaborative assignments in such a way as to guide students through varying levels of cognitive engagement, which can be considerably easier when you have the technology in place to do that. With Harmonize a part of your course design toolkit, you’ll be sure your students can engage in interactions just as meaningfully and effectively as they would in your physical classroom.

If you’re exploring ways to leverage tools that can more deeply engage students learning online, power deeper understanding, and further support student outcomes success, we’d love to connect with you.