ICAP Framework

Overview and Introduction: The WHAT and WHO

Engineering educators often seek ways to move beyond lectures and problem demonstrations to ensure students truly understand complex concepts and can apply them in design or analysis. The ICAP Framework — which stands for Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive — offers a clear, evidence-based approach to develop lessons and evaluate how deeply students are engaging with course material based on the observable student behaviours. Developed by Michelene Chi and colleagues [1], ICAP distinguishes 4 different levels of student engagement predicting their impact on learning:

Passive/Attentive engagement means students are receiving information from the instructional materials without overtly doing anything else related to learning. For example, they might be listening, observing a video, or reading but not anything else. This mode is associated with the lowest level of learning.
Active/Manipulative engagement means students are acting selectively. In other words, some form of overt motoric action is undertaken that selects some content for physical manipulation. For example, selecting parts of what they hear or read for taking verbatim notes, rewinding and rewatching a portion of a video, or highlighting certain text sentences. It is associated with a greater level of learning than Passive engagement.
Constructive/Generative engagement means that students are generating information that is beyond what they have heard or read such as drawing concepts maps or generating notes in their own words This mode leads to a substantially greater level of learning than Active engagement.
Interactive/Co-generative engagement means that students in a group are not only individually Constructive, but they build on each other’s contributions. Although group work does not automatically result in Interactive engagement, when co-generation does occur, it is associated with greater learning gains than Constructive engagement alone.

Fig. 1 illustrates the four ICAP modes of student engagement and their predicted impact on the level of learning. In addition, Table 1 provides examples of common learning activities categorized by ICAP mode and instructional modality (verbal, written, and visual).

Fig. 1. Based on the ICAP framework presented in [1].

Table I
EXAMPLES OF LEARNING ACTIVITIES BY MODES OF ENGAGEMENT