Learning by Example
Mel (my new blogcrush) links to this neat paper on learning and pedagogy styles. If the authors are to be believed (and I don’t have the expertise to evaluate their claims) then the reason I got a B in physics was that there weren’t nearly enough examples for me to follow before I started working through problems on my own. Which makes a lot of sense to me.
The mechanism, apparently, is that while searching for the solution to a problem, we use up so much of our cognitive resources that we don’t have any left over for remembering how we solved the problem, or getting better at solving those problems. That is, when searching for a solution using unfamiliar techniques. Once those techniques are thoroughly learned, then it’s actually more effective to learn by solving problems than to follow along with solutions. But before one is skilled with that, trying to solve problems is, basically, a waste of time.
If I could apply all of the knowledge in that paper, I could probably do a lot better in school than I did last time around.
Go read the paper—it’s good. Here’s the abstract:
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. While unguided or minimally-guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, 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 consistently indicate that minimally-guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. 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.
