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Both your questions are good ones. My own guess is that "active" learning is more effective because it more directly taps into the way the nervous system is "designed" by evolution to learn: by acting and observing the consequences of action, by acquiring experiences and then reflecting on the unconscious understandings resulting from experience to create stories to make sense of them (see Story Telling in Three Dimensions and Brain/Education Parallels). As for resistance, my own guess is that it has to do with the oft mentioned experiences people have already had with educational practices that involve evaluation by testing for context knowledge.