Articles:Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching
From unthinkMedia
This article makes an argument that minimally guided instruction goes against our current knowledge of human architecture, and for that reason is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning.
According to this article, minimal guidance offers recommendations that most educators find almost impossible to implement, cause many effective teacher to ignore them.
Problem solving, as a method of instruction, becomes more effective when the learner has gained enough experience where studying a worked example is, for them, a redundant activity that increases working memory load compared to generating a known solution. This is known as the expertise reversal effect
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Direct Instructional Guidance
An instructional method that centers around lowering extraneous cognitive load by fully explaining the concepts and procedures that learners are required to learn.
The direct instructional goal is to give is to offer guidance on content with methods that are consistent with a learning goal, and store the result in long-term memory. By offering complete information, the learners will result with a more accurate representation that is also more easily acquired.
Controlled experiments indicate that learners who deal with "novel information" should be explicitly shown what to do and how to do it.
Example Approaches
Minimal Guidance
"large amounts of guidance may produce very good performance during practice, but too much guidance may impair later performance. Coaching students about correct responses in math, for example,may impair their ability later to retrieve correct responses from memory on their own." (Wickens. 1992, p. 221)
Example Approaches
- discovery learning (Anthony, 1973; Bruner, 1961)
- problem-based learning (PBL; Barrows & Tamblyn, 1980; Schmidt, 1983)
- inquiry learning (Papert, 1980; Rutherford, 1964)
- experiential learning (Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985; Kolb & Fry, 1975)
- constructivist learning (Jonassen, 1991; Steffe & Gale, 1995)
The author calls these approaches, "a set of differently named but similar instructional approaches requiring minimal guidance that are disconnected from much that we know of human cognition."
Arguments For
- offers an opportunity for student to solve “authentic” problems
- allows learners to "construct" their own knowledge.
- acquire complex knowledge in information-rich settings
- knowledge can best be acquired through experience
Arguments Against
- cannot specify what has been changed in long-term memory
- ignores limits of working memory
- problem-based searching makes heavy demands on working memory making it unavailable for learning
- when participating in pure-discovery methods and minimal feedback, students often get frustrated, and their confusion can lead to "misconceptions".
Quotes
"large amounts of guidance may produce very good performance during practice, but too much guidance may impair later performance. Coaching students about correct responses in math, for example,may impair their ability later to retrieve correct responses from memory on their own." (Wickens. 1992, p. 221)
"Any instructional recommendation that does not or cannot specify what has been changed in long-term memory, or that does not increase the efficiency with which relevant information is stored in or retrieved from long-term memory, is likely to be ineffective." (pg. 77)
Mayer (2004) concluded that the “debate about discovery has been replayed many times in education but each time, the evidence has favored a guided approach to learning” (p. 18).
Reference
Kirschner, P.A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R.E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.
