Student Learning: What Has Instruction Got to
Do With It? Hee Seung Lee and John R. Anderson Annu. Rev. Psychol.
2013.64:445-469 http://www.usc-dr-edens.org/uploads/7/2/5/3/7253252/annurev-psych-student_learning__and_instruction.pdf
Discovery learning is a learning style in which
students receive minimal instruction and construct their own knowledge. Direct instruction is the traditional
learning style of teaching the material and then practicing it. Which style is better?
Although this question is interesting and
relevant for every study domain, most research cited in this interesting paper
was done in math. I hope the conclusions
can be generalized to other domains.
Learning conditions that introduce certain difficulties
during instruction, as happens in discovery learning, appear to slow the rate
of learning but often lead to better long-term retention and transfer than
learning conditions with less difficulty.
This argument was assessed in a
study in
which students were trained to decipher cryptograms with different forms of
instructional methods. The researchers compared students who were given
explicit rules followed by problem practice with students who just tried to
solve the problems and had to discover the rules. The discovery students did
better on transfer problems that required new rules.
In another study, children in discovery classrooms used a variety of physical manipulatives and
worked in pairs to solve mathematical problems. After working in pairs, a
teacher led a whole-class discussion, and the children talked about their
interpretations and solutions. After a while, students were given a
standardized achievement test. The results showed that students in discovery
and regular classrooms were not different in terms of the level of
computational performance. However, the students in the discovery classrooms
demonstrated higher levels of conceptual understanding than those in the regular
classrooms.
In another study, children were traced for
three years to assess understanding of concepts and procedures on multidigit
addition and subtraction. The study compared students who used an invented
strategy with students who used a standard algorithm. Students who invented a
strategy were able to use not only their own invented strategy (if asked to do
so), but also the standard algorithm after they learned that. Invention
students also showed better understanding of base-ten number concepts and
better performance in a transfer task. On the other hand, the algorithm group
showed significantly more buggy algorithms in their problem solving than did
the invented-strategy group, implying
that they depended on the use of learned procedures and lacked a deep
conceptual understanding about the computation procedures.
Discovery learning is believed to increase students’ positive
attitudes toward learning. Learning through exploration allows students to have
more control in a task, and this in turn fosters more intrinsic motivation. In
addition, it is argued that discovery learning enables students to learn
additional facts about the target domain.
The discovery learning approach appears to be
effective only with high levels of practice and more time for the learning
phase than allocated in direct instruction. In the
early phases of learning, students who are learning through discovery make more
errors and understand the material less.
Only when they have enough time to learn and practice they enjoy the
advantages of discovery learning.
Another instruction method that works well is
worked examples. Worked examples
provide an expert’s solution that students can emulate. Students are typically given step by-step solution
steps, and a final answer to the problem. Worked examples are usually
alternated with problems to be solved. Worked examples are very effective in the
early phase of learning. Students
who are prompted to generate their own explanations for worked examples
show greater learning gains than those
who are prompted to paraphrase provided explanations for the same example.
In another study, 7th
grade students solved multistep equations.
One student group studied sets of two differently solved solutions to
the same problem. The students were
asked to compare the two solutions and to contrast them. The two solutions were written on the same
page, and each step was named. Another
student group studied the same sets of two worked examples, but each was
presented on a different page. The
students were not asked to compare and contrast them but rather to think about
each solution. After two days of this
intervention, the student's conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and procedural flexibility were tested. The students who compared between the two
worked examples gained more procedural knowledge and more flexibility, and had
a better transfer ability than students who learned each example by
itself. There was no difference between
the groups in conceptual knowledge.
Often it's best to integrate
discovery learning and direct instruction. In one study, students learned the concept of density. In the
direct instruction condition, student were told the relevant concepts and
formulas on density and then practiced with contrasting cases. In the discovery
condition, students had to invent formulas with the same contrasting cases
first, and then formulas were provided only after they completed all the
inventing tasks. Both groups of students showed a similar level of proficiency
at applying a density formula on a word problem; however, the invention
students showed better performance on the transfer tests that also required an
understanding of ratio concepts but had semantically unrelated topics. The direct
instruction students did not have a chance to find the deep structure because
they simply focused on what they had been told and practiced applying the
learned formulas. The inventing activity appeared to serve as preparation for
future learning, and thus when the expert solutions were provided later, these
students could appreciate the expert solutions better than those who were not
prepared. Even though most students fail to generate valid methods on their own
during the invention phase, this failure experience actually helps students
become prepared to learn better in the following learning phase by activating
students’ prior knowledge and having students attend to critical features of
the learned concepts.
Discovery learning is not always better
than direct instruction. It depends on learner
characteristics. Experienced learners (those who have prior knowledge of the
material) benefit more from minimal instruction (that is, discovery
learning). Students with high levels of prior
knowledge benefit more from comparing and contrasting two worked examples. Students with low levels of prior knowledge learn less well this way. Comparing and contrasting only overloads them. High ability students benefit more from
discovery learning than low ability students. When they have difficulties, high ability students
tend to lean more on previously studied examples than low ability
students. High ability students spend
more time studying worked examples than low ability students. They also have more solution ideas, they can
explain the solutions better, and they can identify their misunderstandings
better than low ability students. Students
with low ability gain more from direct instruction.
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