Here's a passage which really shows how badly the author missed the point:
the paper this thread is about said:
Students, in this model, are passive recipients, and their job is to learn the knowledge. The traditional teaching method is lectures
and assessments are primarily quizzes, midterms, and exams. In contrast, a more dynamic view or subjective of knowledge views knowledge as something that students need to engage with to learn, which may be reflected in more progressive or critical pedagogies (Elias & Merriam, 2005). This is reflected in syllabi through collaborative and active learning, and advanced cognitive skills like application and analysis.
Somehow, the author seems to have gotten the ridiculous idea that STEM students, participating in the traditional lecture/quiz/exam methods do not "engage with" the material.
I am sure that several people reading this thread have gone through a STEM education, like myself, and find it ludicrous to suggest that we didn't engage with the material, and that we didn't do "active learning", or that somehow we didn't use "advanced cognitive skills" like analysis and application. Her paragraph is laughably stupid on this point.
While in graduate school, I took a Linguistics class. There were two engineering students, myself and one other guy, in the class of about 13 students. We were amazed at the lengthy discussions of material that we thought could have been covered in about 10 minutes. Apparently, this was "active learning", and the author of this paper would find it superior to what he and I did, which was often called "reading the book and doing the homework". As a result, he and I got very high test scores, despite the fact that he almost never came to class, and I participated occasionally in class discussions, but never with the enthusiasm that our Liberal Arts colleagues did.
I'm pretty sure I learned at least as much about linguistics as those "active learners" did, and, moreover, I'm pretty sure that my reading of the book and doing the exercises assigned actually constituted an active engagement with the material.
I'm going to guess that the author of this thesis spent somewhat less time doing homework on her way to a Women's Studies degree than I did on my way to an Electrical Engineering degree.