5 ms·

Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work (2006) [pdf]

122 points by eBombzor 8y ago

telotortium 8y ago
> Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert–novice differences, and cognitive load. Although un- guided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appeal- ing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that con- sistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than in- structional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning pro- cess. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.
sdrothrock 8y ago
My knee-jerk instinct was to read this paper and take it as truth in the sense that it's "debunking a popular belief," much like the "types of learning" belief. However, this paper is 12 years old, so I was curious about whether there had been any responses. I found this blog entry, which seems to be relatively well-researched: http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-kirschner.html http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-... Especially of note is the section that states: > The paper relies heavily on Cognitive Load Theory, yet we have to realize that it is still a theory rather than a law. The author also quotes Joel Michael to unpack some of the difficulties in studying educational methodology in general, which gave me some perspective. It's something I've thought about a lot since many Japanese people mourn the "yutori kyoiku" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education) philosophy and I would often wonder which generations of students were a result of that system and which were simply molded by other social pressures.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  I felt the paper's reliance on cognitive load theory was a bit problematic. I'd have a different theory about the problems of "experiential learning" in a class room setting. I've taught myself a lot on my own and so the idea of exploratory learning always appealed to me. But all the experiential learning circumstances I've been exposed to just felt like tricks. The teacher has something in mind they want the student to learn, doesn't tell them exactly what that is, and still expects them to learn to exactly that thing, rather than some other things that the circumstances presented might teach the student. Actually, this relates to a lot of contexts. One example is those terrible job interviews where the interviewer says something vague like "tell me about yourself" but expects to learn specific thing. Another is Role Playing Games (I'm an avid player of these). There's a classic problem where a dungeon master expects their players to explore a city and make a specific discovery with the clues given. That's typically much harder than the DM imagines and experienced DMs learn to just set-up situation and let whatever the players discover be what happens. In general, I think a teacher or authority should say what they want in a learning or examination process, if they want a specific thing. Because if they don't say that, their idea of what a person would "naturally" discover through exploration might actually be wrong, indeed given the natural variation in people's cognition, it probably is going to be wrong some large portion of the time for many students.
  - singingfish 8y ago
    Cognitive load theory is fairly straightforward. People are able to handle 7±2 items in their working (short-term) memory at any one time. This means reliably 5 items. Subtract one for standard normal distractors. Thus students should not be expected to have to juggle more than 4 items at any one time. The problem here is that what an item is for a student is different than what an item is for an instructor. This is due to "chunking" (technical term from psychology). For the instructor, discovering what an item is especially difficult, as they may not be aware of what they had to learn to know what they now know. Personally I'm all for minimal guidance, but it has to be closely aligned to learning outcomes, and the instructor needs to understand what an item means for the student, if they are to have a hope of introducing less than four things at a time. CLT is a solid theory with an extremely good basis. However understanding how to apply it is hard given the knowledge difference between student and instructor.
lysium 8y ago
Interesting! The authors state their findings in the conclusions: > After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly sup- ports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instructions of novice to intermediate learners. I’m disappointed, though, that having a teacher who teaches physics by standing and talking in front of a class appears to be optimal. I wish there would be a more engaging alternative.
- kurthr 8y ago
  I don't know what level of physics you're taking, but the lecture portion is mostly motivational introduction (literally motivating particular types of solutions or insights), but it's not where you learn the details of models or techniques for solution. That is done in some combination of reading the text (before class), previous or concurrent math classes (algebra, calculus, analysis, linear algebra, ODE, complex analysis, PDE, abstract algebra each go really well with particular topics), recitation with a TA (where you can ask for aditional detailed questions), and homework sets (that you'll want to discuss with the TA as well). If you have good labs, you'll actually prove many of the relationships by experiment... and you'll see how hard it is to actually do science (there are so damn many ways to do physical things wrong!). Like programming the details involve sitting down and cranking out the solutions and having the aha moments by yourself. It's easy to be wowed by a lecture, but if you can't teach it to someone else you don't really understand it.
  - lysium 8y ago
    You are right, our teacher / school could have combined upfront teaching with all the activities you've described!
    - kurthr 8y ago
      Yeah, it can be frustrating. Try to develop friends with the same interest at multiple levels, and you can fill in some of the gaps yourself. Asking the professor during office hours what other learning opportunities they know of which will help the depth of the course may get you an advocate and a few suggestions. They may be frustrated and burned out too. The most frustrated I ever saw professors were teaching pre-med, where the students literally only cared about the grades.
MarkMc 8y ago
Coincidentally I just finished reading the section on minimal guidance in the great book, "How I Wish I'd Taught Maths" [1] Here's the relevant bit: --------- Guided discovery lesson plans can be found on most topics in maths. Geometry is a particularly fertile breeding ground. Take something like circle theorems. Instead of simply explaining to students the Angle at the Centre relationship, why not have them discover it for themselves? Give them a set of blank circles, instructions to construct several formulations of the theorem, each time giving them complete freedom as to where they place their three points on the circumference, challenge them to measure the two relevant angles and then see what they notice. Students get important practice of measuring angles, a feeling of involvement in their own learning, and may even teach themselves a key GCSE topic without me needing to say a word. What could possibly go wrong? I was particularly proud of a guided discovery task I came up with for introducing some of the more complex laws of indices to my Year 11 class two years ago. The worksheet looked like this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfJjT058t55C_LR8LE1D3PaSRg9tY490/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfJjT058t55C_LR8LE1D3PaSRg9... Nice, eh? Again, I ask the question: what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out. Take the laws of indices lesson. The best that can happen is that all students discover the laws of indices for themselves, leaving no gaps in their knowledge, nor developing any misconceptions, in a reasonable time frame. We can then proceed with the rest of the lesson, maybe moving on to application questions, or interleaving other topics into the examples (see Chapter 12), such as indices involving surds or fractions. How often does that actually happen? In my experience, literally never. What actually happens is that one or two students discover exactly what I wanted them to discover. They are feeling great about themselves, and rightly so –as we have seen in Chapter 2, success is motivating. A handful of students have some kind of idea what is going on, but with an eclectic mix of gaps in their knowledge and newly formed misconceptions. Some of these students are aware they have gaps and misconceptions, others are blissfully ignorant. And the rest of the students do not have a flipping clue what is going on. They are feeling confused and pretty down about themselves when they see their fellow classmates have figured it out. Any form of decent formative assessment strategy (Chapter 11) quickly reveals this disparity between levels of understanding, and as such I cannot move on with the lesson. So what do I inevitably end up doing? Teaching the laws of indices, of course! Maybe I will set those students who seem to have understood it off on the work I hoped everyone else would be moving on to –mind you, I would really like them to hear my explanation and do the worked examples, but how can I justify doing so when they have demonstrated their understanding? Hmmm… Anyway, back to the rest of the class. By this stage, I am 30 minutes into a 50-minute lesson, rattling through a series of worked examples on the laws of indices far quicker and with much less care than I should. There is zero time for the students to practise their newly acquired skills and hence consolidate their knowledge, nor sufficient time for me to do any kind of application questions which would show them the full breadth of the topic. But it is even worse than that. Even if I could somehow freeze time and spend those lost 30 minutes going through carefully structured and well-chosen worked examples, I am not back at square one. I am behind square one, because my students are no longer coming at the topic with fresh eyes. Many of those who failed to ‘discover’ the key relationships have already decided that indices are difficult, and yet another area of maths that they don’t understand. It’s going to take more than my magically retrieved 30 minutes to turn that one around. -------- Later the author describes how his approach has now changed to direct guidance. Of this approach he writes: A common complaint I hear from teachers when I describe this approach is that students are not as actively involved as they would be during guided discovery. My response is that it depends on what you mean by active, and its anthesis, passive. If active students are ones making noise, working in groups, moving around the classroom, going about the task several different ways, getting some things right but plenty of things wrong, whereas passive students are sitting there quietly, thinking hard about the mathematics I am presenting, then I know which one I would prefer, especially at this early knowledge acquisition stage. For me, such ‘activity’ is exactly the poor proxy for learning that Coe (2013) warns us about. Students may well be active, but active doing what? What are they thinking about? What are they expanding their precious, limited working memory reserves on? During these demonstrations, my students are active in another sense. They are actively thinking hard about the matter in hand – or at least I am creating conditions to give them the very best chance of thinking hard about the matter in hand, and nothing else. Such activity is impossible to see, hence it is often dismissed as passivity and a lack of engagement. But periods of quiet contemplation like this are the key to learning, especially when we consider in greater depth the limits of working memory 1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Wish-Taught-Maths-conversations/dp/1911382497 https://www.amazon.com/How-Wish-Taught-Maths-conversations/d...
solatic 8y ago
After skimming the paper, I get the sense that there's this underlying assumption that the goal of education is to get students to learn specific facts, i.e. that a physics student should learn the formula that force equals mass times acceleration. While there is of course lots of value in ensuring that students can learn specific facts and figures, the criticism (if I recall correctly) is that an approach that dictates specificity of recall as the end goal is not an approach that induces a lifelong love of learning. Most of the value in an experiential-based approach is not limited to the specificity of facts learned during the experiences, but in the cognitive linking of learning with the dynamism of the experience, which encourages independent growth. This leads back to the philosophical question of whether our school systems should focus on graduating students who know specific knowledge (an approach that leads to standardized testing), or students who have become independently capable lifelong learners (a more holistic approach that tries to adapt to students' individual strengths). Which approach better prepares students for life after school, and equally important, which approach can prove to scale to the levels required for public education?
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  It's not a either-or choice. You can certainly know a lot of facts while at the same time developing those skills. In fact, my guess would be that the two are related: learning a lot of facts teaches one to learn arbitrary things, even things that aren't that interesting. This, learning things not that interesting, is the skill. My money says an education is about developing a certain set of habits. The base one is probably being able to sit down by yourself and memorize a bunch of arbitrary detail that you can recall on command, but that's just the base, maybe 1% of the habits you should get. I don't know, though. We may just suck at managing public education, not implementing it. In that case, no discussion of underlying theory is ever going to amount to much more than noise.
  - lowry 8y ago
    Sherlock Holmes famously refused to learn things that would be useless for his job, to keep his mind tidily organized. He is a fictional character, but the idea that learning facts can be detrimental to someone's ability is interesting. Look at yourself: browsing Hacker News and Twitter in the morning to achieve little by the end of the day. ;-)
mario0b1 8y ago
This paper is really fascinating (because one of my flatmates is a huge advocate for unguided learning). Do any newer papers like this exist? Maybe even one that shows that minimal guidance could be positive? I'd love to read more.
- eBombzor 8y ago
  You may have already seen this but @sdrothrock posted this interesting counter-article that defends constructionism (minimal guidance).
  - eBombzor 8y ago
    https://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-kirschner.html https://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of...
    - mario0b1 8y ago
      Thanks!
edtechdev 8y ago
There have been numerous refutations of this opinion piece: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based-learning-videogames-inquiry-learning-constructivism-pedagogical-agents-all-bad/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based-lea... As well as criticisms of their central underlying theory, cognitive load theory, which is unfalsifiable: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... And there is a wealth of counter-evidence on how constructivist inspired teaching techniques (like active learning, inquiry learning, problem-based learning) and technologies (like simulations, modeling tools, games) are more effective for student learning: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/evidence-for-various-research-based-instructional-strategies-countering-critiques/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/evidence-for-vari... Unfortunately, fans of the neo-traditional perspective presented in this article plastered it all over Wikipedia 10 years ago, overwriting and ignoring any contrary evidence and opinions, leading to today: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/an-argument-for-knols-over-wikipedia-and-citizendium/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/an-argument-for-k...
- specialist 8y ago
  Excellent. Thank you. Do you know of a handy (ELI5) layperson's explanation for state of the art learning techniques? As a parent of K-12 students, what should I be advocating? As a life-long learner, what style of courseware should I seek out? As a person who has taught & mentored 100s of peers how to code, informally, what's are some strategies and techniques I should consider? -- A good friend teaches highschool physics using ASU's Modeling Instruction Program. He claims terrific results. http://modeling.asu.edu http://modeling.asu.edu As a layperson, I can't make heads or tails of the online resources. What he describes, using the Socrates method in the classroom, sounds exciting. But I don't know enough to act on that tidbit.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    Not OP (and I don't have much time), but as of about 5 years ago (last time I was spending time reading papers), the biggest thing I ran across was the spacing effect (which is different than spaced repetition). You may have heard of spaced repetition. Very quickly whether or not you remember something is a random variable with a vaguely gamma distribution. Your chance of remembering is a function of how long it was since you last looked at it. So if you wait 5 minutes, you might have a 90% recall chance, whereas if you wait 5 days, you might have 20% recall chance. The speed that the recall chance goes down is a function of how many times you have reviewed something and how much time has gone on between reviews. Better than trying to understand my terrible description, look up "forgetting curve". Anyway, in spaced repetition, you usually try to time your reviews so that you have a 90% recall chance. This minimises the amount of time you have to do review. Also, initial remembering of something takes a lot of time, while reviewing something you already remember takes very little time, so you try to make sure that you review it before you have forgotten it. Usually at around 90% recall rate, after 12 reviews, you're many, many months between reviews, so it's insanely efficient. However, there is a completely different thing called the "spacing effect". What that says is that if you forget something, and then relearn it, the forgetting curve will be much, much, much shallower than if you had done the spaced repetition (papers on spacing effect don't put it that way at all, so you're getting a big dose of my bias -- better to do some research on it. But I'll continue anyway since I think this is the easiest way to understand it). What this means is that you can remember things much, much more easily if you forget them first and then relearn them. So in this school of thought (literally -- ha ha) you learn something, then you wait until you forget it, then you learn it again. In studies, this has been called the most profound learning effect every seen (pretty powerful words!) So there are some other people who like the spacing effect thing and thought there must be a better way than randomly waiting until people forget stuff. So they came up with an idea called "interleaving". In interleaving, instead of learning one subject for and hour or two and concentrating on it until you understand it, you study something for 10 minutes, then study something else, and then something else, etc, etc, etc. After 6 or 7 goes of this, you circle back to the original thing and study it again. The idea is that by keeping distracting yourself, you have no way of remembering anything at all -- which speeds up the spacing effect. (Though, one might note that this starts to get into the realm of spaced repetition -- and I think it's not a coincidence). Basically, in interleaving you try to mix everything up and make sure that you are constantly looking at something new. But, of course, this sucks. I mean it sucks enormously. You never feel comfortable. You can't remember anything. As soon as you think you are getting the hang of something, the topic changes and you freaking forget it all. It's hell. Which has led this kind of thing to be referred to as "desirable difficulty". If the studies are to be believed, the potential is incredible. I'm not sure I believe the studies completely, but I've experimented on my own students (when I was teaching) and I was pretty impressed with the results I was getting. Still, really early days with this research, though and I wouldn't be surprised if someone replies to this message with something like, "Yeah, somebody found out in the last few years that it's a load of BS". Education and psychology are pretty damn hard to do studies on ;-)
dhimes 8y ago
Also relevant- (2004 pdf) https://app.nova.edu/toolbox/instructionalproducts/8001/EDD8001/SUM12/2004-Mayer.pdf https://app.nova.edu/toolbox/instructionalproducts/8001/EDD8... But, yeah, I think anybody who has taught anything beyond the experiential discovers this. Mayers summarizes it as people have confused constructivist theories of learning with effective ways of teaching. We might learn through constructivism, but learning is more efficient if we guide that construction.
- Matticus_Rex 8y ago
  I'm a former teacher and I disagree pretty strongly with the paper based on both my experience and on the fact that this paper has been pretty thoroughly gutted by the literature. The more specific you want the knowledge outputs to be, the more guidance you have to give, as a general rule, but inquiry-based approaches lead to something I call "white swan" learning (with apologies/thanks to Taleb). People often find something through the inquiry that they're enthusiastic about learning, and then they continue learning about that long after they've completed whatever was required. It's not something you can plan, and you don't know which or how many kids will find something with which project, but it happens reliably and for each of those kids finding that topic (and the joy and practice of learning something they are interested in in-depth) is far more effective than semesters of "normal" learning.
  - dhimes 8y ago
    If you want your students to discover the Newton's second law you are going to have a hard time getting them to do so in a two-hour lab. It took Newton himself considerably longer, and he was actually deeply interested in the problem. Inquiry does work well, but not without guidance, unless your sole outcome goal is the inquiry process itself. Even at the other end of the spectrum, the Ph.D. candidate or post-doc, things can get pretty miserable if they are poorly mentored. So while I applaud you for helping develop natural curiosity (but does it stick? That's another question. Do those kids go on to ask more questions like you've started an engine in their minds, or two years later are they just like everybody else...), if you have curricular goals to meet such that their future classes depend on them knowing the content you are supposed to teach, guiding them is much more efficient.
RobertRoberts 8y ago
This guy promotes evidence based education, meaning you can't "guess" or "hope" that an educational technique works, you have to be able to prove, demonstrate and repeatedly get effective results with your education. Direct instruction (from the little I know) works, and has been rigorously tested scientifically. http://measuredeffects.com/ http://measuredeffects.com/ The quote on the home page: >"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. --J.Tukey, 1962"
aj7 8y ago
Proof is watching average machinists struggle to get decent postable CNC machine instructions from the Autodesk 360 “free” CAM system. Well-trained machinists and college guys have no problems. But most would be better off manually programming.

122 points by eBombzor 8y ago

> Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert–novice differences, and cognitive load. Although un- guided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appeal- ing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half-century that con- sistently indicate that minimally guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than in- structional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning pro- cess. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide “internal” guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

sdrothrock 8y ago

My knee-jerk instinct was to read this paper and take it as truth in the sense that it's "debunking a popular belief," much like the "types of learning" belief. However, this paper is 12 years old, so I was curious about whether there had been any responses. I found this blog entry, which seems to be relatively well-researched: http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-kirschner.html http://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-... Especially of note is the section that states: > The paper relies heavily on Cognitive Load Theory, yet we have to realize that it is still a theory rather than a law. The author also quotes Joel Michael to unpack some of the difficulties in studying educational methodology in general, which gave me some perspective. It's something I've thought about a lot since many Japanese people mourn the "yutori kyoiku" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutori_education) philosophy and I would often wonder which generations of students were a result of that system and which were simply molded by other social pressures.

joe_the_user 8y ago
I felt the paper's reliance on cognitive load theory was a bit problematic. I'd have a different theory about the problems of "experiential learning" in a class room setting. I've taught myself a lot on my own and so the idea of exploratory learning always appealed to me. But all the experiential learning circumstances I've been exposed to just felt like tricks. The teacher has something in mind they want the student to learn, doesn't tell them exactly what that is, and still expects them to learn to exactly that thing, rather than some other things that the circumstances presented might teach the student. Actually, this relates to a lot of contexts. One example is those terrible job interviews where the interviewer says something vague like "tell me about yourself" but expects to learn specific thing. Another is Role Playing Games (I'm an avid player of these). There's a classic problem where a dungeon master expects their players to explore a city and make a specific discovery with the clues given. That's typically much harder than the DM imagines and experienced DMs learn to just set-up situation and let whatever the players discover be what happens. In general, I think a teacher or authority should say what they want in a learning or examination process, if they want a specific thing. Because if they don't say that, their idea of what a person would "naturally" discover through exploration might actually be wrong, indeed given the natural variation in people's cognition, it probably is going to be wrong some large portion of the time for many students.
- singingfish 8y ago
  Cognitive load theory is fairly straightforward. People are able to handle 7±2 items in their working (short-term) memory at any one time. This means reliably 5 items. Subtract one for standard normal distractors. Thus students should not be expected to have to juggle more than 4 items at any one time. The problem here is that what an item is for a student is different than what an item is for an instructor. This is due to "chunking" (technical term from psychology). For the instructor, discovering what an item is especially difficult, as they may not be aware of what they had to learn to know what they now know. Personally I'm all for minimal guidance, but it has to be closely aligned to learning outcomes, and the instructor needs to understand what an item means for the student, if they are to have a hope of introducing less than four things at a time. CLT is a solid theory with an extremely good basis. However understanding how to apply it is hard given the knowledge difference between student and instructor.

lysium 8y ago

Interesting! The authors state their findings in the conclusions: > After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly sup- ports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instructions of novice to intermediate learners. I’m disappointed, though, that having a teacher who teaches physics by standing and talking in front of a class appears to be optimal. I wish there would be a more engaging alternative.

kurthr 8y ago
I don't know what level of physics you're taking, but the lecture portion is mostly motivational introduction (literally motivating particular types of solutions or insights), but it's not where you learn the details of models or techniques for solution. That is done in some combination of reading the text (before class), previous or concurrent math classes (algebra, calculus, analysis, linear algebra, ODE, complex analysis, PDE, abstract algebra each go really well with particular topics), recitation with a TA (where you can ask for aditional detailed questions), and homework sets (that you'll want to discuss with the TA as well). If you have good labs, you'll actually prove many of the relationships by experiment... and you'll see how hard it is to actually do science (there are so damn many ways to do physical things wrong!). Like programming the details involve sitting down and cranking out the solutions and having the aha moments by yourself. It's easy to be wowed by a lecture, but if you can't teach it to someone else you don't really understand it.
- lysium 8y ago
  You are right, our teacher / school could have combined upfront teaching with all the activities you've described!
  - kurthr 8y ago
    Yeah, it can be frustrating. Try to develop friends with the same interest at multiple levels, and you can fill in some of the gaps yourself. Asking the professor during office hours what other learning opportunities they know of which will help the depth of the course may get you an advocate and a few suggestions. They may be frustrated and burned out too. The most frustrated I ever saw professors were teaching pre-med, where the students literally only cared about the grades.

MarkMc 8y ago

Coincidentally I just finished reading the section on minimal guidance in the great book, "How I Wish I'd Taught Maths" [1] Here's the relevant bit: --------- Guided discovery lesson plans can be found on most topics in maths. Geometry is a particularly fertile breeding ground. Take something like circle theorems. Instead of simply explaining to students the Angle at the Centre relationship, why not have them discover it for themselves? Give them a set of blank circles, instructions to construct several formulations of the theorem, each time giving them complete freedom as to where they place their three points on the circumference, challenge them to measure the two relevant angles and then see what they notice. Students get important practice of measuring angles, a feeling of involvement in their own learning, and may even teach themselves a key GCSE topic without me needing to say a word. What could possibly go wrong? I was particularly proud of a guided discovery task I came up with for introducing some of the more complex laws of indices to my Year 11 class two years ago. The worksheet looked like this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfJjT058t55C_LR8LE1D3PaSRg9tY490/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PfJjT058t55C_LR8LE1D3PaSRg9... Nice, eh? Again, I ask the question: what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out. Take the laws of indices lesson. The best that can happen is that all students discover the laws of indices for themselves, leaving no gaps in their knowledge, nor developing any misconceptions, in a reasonable time frame. We can then proceed with the rest of the lesson, maybe moving on to application questions, or interleaving other topics into the examples (see Chapter 12), such as indices involving surds or fractions. How often does that actually happen? In my experience, literally never. What actually happens is that one or two students discover exactly what I wanted them to discover. They are feeling great about themselves, and rightly so –as we have seen in Chapter 2, success is motivating. A handful of students have some kind of idea what is going on, but with an eclectic mix of gaps in their knowledge and newly formed misconceptions. Some of these students are aware they have gaps and misconceptions, others are blissfully ignorant. And the rest of the students do not have a flipping clue what is going on. They are feeling confused and pretty down about themselves when they see their fellow classmates have figured it out. Any form of decent formative assessment strategy (Chapter 11) quickly reveals this disparity between levels of understanding, and as such I cannot move on with the lesson. So what do I inevitably end up doing? Teaching the laws of indices, of course! Maybe I will set those students who seem to have understood it off on the work I hoped everyone else would be moving on to –mind you, I would really like them to hear my explanation and do the worked examples, but how can I justify doing so when they have demonstrated their understanding? Hmmm… Anyway, back to the rest of the class. By this stage, I am 30 minutes into a 50-minute lesson, rattling through a series of worked examples on the laws of indices far quicker and with much less care than I should. There is zero time for the students to practise their newly acquired skills and hence consolidate their knowledge, nor sufficient time for me to do any kind of application questions which would show them the full breadth of the topic. But it is even worse than that. Even if I could somehow freeze time and spend those lost 30 minutes going through carefully structured and well-chosen worked examples, I am not back at square one. I am behind square one, because my students are no longer coming at the topic with fresh eyes. Many of those who failed to ‘discover’ the key relationships have already decided that indices are difficult, and yet another area of maths that they don’t understand. It’s going to take more than my magically retrieved 30 minutes to turn that one around. -------- Later the author describes how his approach has now changed to direct guidance. Of this approach he writes: A common complaint I hear from teachers when I describe this approach is that students are not as actively involved as they would be during guided discovery. My response is that it depends on what you mean by active, and its anthesis, passive. If active students are ones making noise, working in groups, moving around the classroom, going about the task several different ways, getting some things right but plenty of things wrong, whereas passive students are sitting there quietly, thinking hard about the mathematics I am presenting, then I know which one I would prefer, especially at this early knowledge acquisition stage. For me, such ‘activity’ is exactly the poor proxy for learning that Coe (2013) warns us about. Students may well be active, but active doing what? What are they thinking about? What are they expanding their precious, limited working memory reserves on? During these demonstrations, my students are active in another sense. They are actively thinking hard about the matter in hand – or at least I am creating conditions to give them the very best chance of thinking hard about the matter in hand, and nothing else. Such activity is impossible to see, hence it is often dismissed as passivity and a lack of engagement. But periods of quiet contemplation like this are the key to learning, especially when we consider in greater depth the limits of working memory 1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Wish-Taught-Maths-conversations/dp/1911382497 https://www.amazon.com/How-Wish-Taught-Maths-conversations/d...

solatic 8y ago

After skimming the paper, I get the sense that there's this underlying assumption that the goal of education is to get students to learn specific facts, i.e. that a physics student should learn the formula that force equals mass times acceleration. While there is of course lots of value in ensuring that students can learn specific facts and figures, the criticism (if I recall correctly) is that an approach that dictates specificity of recall as the end goal is not an approach that induces a lifelong love of learning. Most of the value in an experiential-based approach is not limited to the specificity of facts learned during the experiences, but in the cognitive linking of learning with the dynamism of the experience, which encourages independent growth. This leads back to the philosophical question of whether our school systems should focus on graduating students who know specific knowledge (an approach that leads to standardized testing), or students who have become independently capable lifelong learners (a more holistic approach that tries to adapt to students' individual strengths). Which approach better prepares students for life after school, and equally important, which approach can prove to scale to the levels required for public education?

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
It's not a either-or choice. You can certainly know a lot of facts while at the same time developing those skills. In fact, my guess would be that the two are related: learning a lot of facts teaches one to learn arbitrary things, even things that aren't that interesting. This, learning things not that interesting, is the skill. My money says an education is about developing a certain set of habits. The base one is probably being able to sit down by yourself and memorize a bunch of arbitrary detail that you can recall on command, but that's just the base, maybe 1% of the habits you should get. I don't know, though. We may just suck at managing public education, not implementing it. In that case, no discussion of underlying theory is ever going to amount to much more than noise.
- lowry 8y ago
  Sherlock Holmes famously refused to learn things that would be useless for his job, to keep his mind tidily organized. He is a fictional character, but the idea that learning facts can be detrimental to someone's ability is interesting. Look at yourself: browsing Hacker News and Twitter in the morning to achieve little by the end of the day. ;-)

mario0b1 8y ago

This paper is really fascinating (because one of my flatmates is a huge advocate for unguided learning). Do any newer papers like this exist? Maybe even one that shows that minimal guidance could be positive? I'd love to read more.

eBombzor 8y ago
You may have already seen this but @sdrothrock posted this interesting counter-article that defends constructionism (minimal guidance).
- eBombzor 8y ago
  https://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of-kirschner.html https://bdld.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-years-later-review-of...
  - mario0b1 8y ago
    Thanks!

edtechdev 8y ago

There have been numerous refutations of this opinion piece: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based-learning-videogames-inquiry-learning-constructivism-pedagogical-agents-all-bad/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/problem-based-lea... As well as criticisms of their central underlying theory, cognitive load theory, which is unfalsifiable: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-theory-failure/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... And there is a wealth of counter-evidence on how constructivist inspired teaching techniques (like active learning, inquiry learning, problem-based learning) and technologies (like simulations, modeling tools, games) are more effective for student learning: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/evidence-for-various-research-based-instructional-strategies-countering-critiques/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/evidence-for-vari... Unfortunately, fans of the neo-traditional perspective presented in this article plastered it all over Wikipedia 10 years ago, overwriting and ignoring any contrary evidence and opinions, leading to today: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/an-argument-for-knols-over-wikipedia-and-citizendium/ https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2007/12/26/an-argument-for-k...

specialist 8y ago
Excellent. Thank you. Do you know of a handy (ELI5) layperson's explanation for state of the art learning techniques? As a parent of K-12 students, what should I be advocating? As a life-long learner, what style of courseware should I seek out? As a person who has taught & mentored 100s of peers how to code, informally, what's are some strategies and techniques I should consider? -- A good friend teaches highschool physics using ASU's Modeling Instruction Program. He claims terrific results. http://modeling.asu.edu http://modeling.asu.edu As a layperson, I can't make heads or tails of the online resources. What he describes, using the Socrates method in the classroom, sounds exciting. But I don't know enough to act on that tidbit.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  Not OP (and I don't have much time), but as of about 5 years ago (last time I was spending time reading papers), the biggest thing I ran across was the spacing effect (which is different than spaced repetition). You may have heard of spaced repetition. Very quickly whether or not you remember something is a random variable with a vaguely gamma distribution. Your chance of remembering is a function of how long it was since you last looked at it. So if you wait 5 minutes, you might have a 90% recall chance, whereas if you wait 5 days, you might have 20% recall chance. The speed that the recall chance goes down is a function of how many times you have reviewed something and how much time has gone on between reviews. Better than trying to understand my terrible description, look up "forgetting curve". Anyway, in spaced repetition, you usually try to time your reviews so that you have a 90% recall chance. This minimises the amount of time you have to do review. Also, initial remembering of something takes a lot of time, while reviewing something you already remember takes very little time, so you try to make sure that you review it before you have forgotten it. Usually at around 90% recall rate, after 12 reviews, you're many, many months between reviews, so it's insanely efficient. However, there is a completely different thing called the "spacing effect". What that says is that if you forget something, and then relearn it, the forgetting curve will be much, much, much shallower than if you had done the spaced repetition (papers on spacing effect don't put it that way at all, so you're getting a big dose of my bias -- better to do some research on it. But I'll continue anyway since I think this is the easiest way to understand it). What this means is that you can remember things much, much more easily if you forget them first and then relearn them. So in this school of thought (literally -- ha ha) you learn something, then you wait until you forget it, then you learn it again. In studies, this has been called the most profound learning effect every seen (pretty powerful words!) So there are some other people who like the spacing effect thing and thought there must be a better way than randomly waiting until people forget stuff. So they came up with an idea called "interleaving". In interleaving, instead of learning one subject for and hour or two and concentrating on it until you understand it, you study something for 10 minutes, then study something else, and then something else, etc, etc, etc. After 6 or 7 goes of this, you circle back to the original thing and study it again. The idea is that by keeping distracting yourself, you have no way of remembering anything at all -- which speeds up the spacing effect. (Though, one might note that this starts to get into the realm of spaced repetition -- and I think it's not a coincidence). Basically, in interleaving you try to mix everything up and make sure that you are constantly looking at something new. But, of course, this sucks. I mean it sucks enormously. You never feel comfortable. You can't remember anything. As soon as you think you are getting the hang of something, the topic changes and you freaking forget it all. It's hell. Which has led this kind of thing to be referred to as "desirable difficulty". If the studies are to be believed, the potential is incredible. I'm not sure I believe the studies completely, but I've experimented on my own students (when I was teaching) and I was pretty impressed with the results I was getting. Still, really early days with this research, though and I wouldn't be surprised if someone replies to this message with something like, "Yeah, somebody found out in the last few years that it's a load of BS". Education and psychology are pretty damn hard to do studies on ;-)

dhimes 8y ago

Also relevant- (2004 pdf) https://app.nova.edu/toolbox/instructionalproducts/8001/EDD8001/SUM12/2004-Mayer.pdf https://app.nova.edu/toolbox/instructionalproducts/8001/EDD8... But, yeah, I think anybody who has taught anything beyond the experiential discovers this. Mayers summarizes it as people have confused constructivist theories of learning with effective ways of teaching. We might learn through constructivism, but learning is more efficient if we guide that construction.

Matticus_Rex 8y ago
I'm a former teacher and I disagree pretty strongly with the paper based on both my experience and on the fact that this paper has been pretty thoroughly gutted by the literature. The more specific you want the knowledge outputs to be, the more guidance you have to give, as a general rule, but inquiry-based approaches lead to something I call "white swan" learning (with apologies/thanks to Taleb). People often find something through the inquiry that they're enthusiastic about learning, and then they continue learning about that long after they've completed whatever was required. It's not something you can plan, and you don't know which or how many kids will find something with which project, but it happens reliably and for each of those kids finding that topic (and the joy and practice of learning something they are interested in in-depth) is far more effective than semesters of "normal" learning.
- dhimes 8y ago
  If you want your students to discover the Newton's second law you are going to have a hard time getting them to do so in a two-hour lab. It took Newton himself considerably longer, and he was actually deeply interested in the problem. Inquiry does work well, but not without guidance, unless your sole outcome goal is the inquiry process itself. Even at the other end of the spectrum, the Ph.D. candidate or post-doc, things can get pretty miserable if they are poorly mentored. So while I applaud you for helping develop natural curiosity (but does it stick? That's another question. Do those kids go on to ask more questions like you've started an engine in their minds, or two years later are they just like everybody else...), if you have curricular goals to meet such that their future classes depend on them knowing the content you are supposed to teach, guiding them is much more efficient.

RobertRoberts 8y ago

This guy promotes evidence based education, meaning you can't "guess" or "hope" that an educational technique works, you have to be able to prove, demonstrate and repeatedly get effective results with your education. Direct instruction (from the little I know) works, and has been rigorously tested scientifically. http://measuredeffects.com/ http://measuredeffects.com/ The quote on the home page: >"Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. --J.Tukey, 1962"

aj7 8y ago

Proof is watching average machinists struggle to get decent postable CNC machine instructions from the Autodesk 360 “free” CAM system. Well-trained machinists and college guys have no problems. But most would be better off manually programming.