Objective measures of actual learning show that "active" methods, in which students directly engage in answering questions or solving problems in class with instructors providing timely feedback, clearly outperform traditional lecture-based approaches . There is a myriad of research-about 1,000 published studies-generally consistent with these findings. Yet student perceptions of learning do not always correlate with actual learning gains , which can thus lead to a misleading narrative associated with the use of active learning methods. Additionally, this study separated different course factors and examined the degree to which each factor contributed to student perceptions of learning. The results are useful because the factors which were identified as more influential may be leveraged to increase student belief in the effectiveness of active learning methods. Finally, this study looked at possible relations between student perceptions of learning and the amount of effort and pleasure that they experienced during their coursework. It was expected that there would be some relationship between student perceptions of learning and the amount of effort they make based on the "deliberate practice" premise, i.e., that the amount of practice (effort) one makes and the expertise (learning) they develop are positively related. Thus, it was surprising to find little if any correlation between student perceptions of learning and the level of effort/difficulty that they experienced in their coursework. On the other hand, student perceptions of learning correlated very slightly with the amount of pleasure that they experienced.