Do You Learn More by Struggling on Hard Problems? - Scott H Young - Deepstash
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Examples First: The Power of Direct Instruction

Examples First: The Power of Direct Instruction

Nearly every problem is easier if someone shows you how to solve it first.

Direct Instruction (DI), is an instructional method developed by Siegfried Engelmann and others. DI starts by breaking complex skills into atomic components and carefully illustrates these components with examples before giving students lots of practice on those pieces. When students fail to learn, DI assumes the problem is usually with the lesson, not the student.

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Problems First: Failure Being Productive

Problems First: Failure Being Productive

The intuition behind solving problems first is also self-evident: how can you learn to solve problems yourself if you are always told exactly how?

Activation of prior knowledge. If you already have some knowledge of how to solve a problem, directly trying to solve it will force you to try to retrieve that knowledge.  

Conceptual understanding. Seeing a problem first may make it easier to understand the conditions where the solution applies. 

Motivation and engagement. Students may tune out if they only study worked examples. It’s impossible to solve a problem without cognitive engagement

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The Contest Winner: Finding The Right Side

The Contest Winner: Finding The Right Side

It’s abundantly clear that both practice and instruction are necessary for effective learning. Advocates of Direct Instruction make ample room for practice after seeing examples. Studies that support a problem-first approach still require that the student is eventually shown the correct answer.

Thus, we can immediately rule out extremes. Pure discovery learning, where students are never shown instructions or examples, fails miserably.

Regardless of the optimal procedure—either see an example, then do practice, or attempt a solution, then see the example—both ingredients are necessary.

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Designing Your Practice Loop

Designing Your Practice Loop

Early on, struggle may help you get a sense of the problem, but you’re unlikely to arrive at the best answer spontaneously. In that case, difficulty can become undesirable. Even if you can figure out how to solve a problem, you may still benefit from seeing an example. Work in cognitive load theory suggests that studying the “correct” example is beneficial because it helps you learn the general pattern for solving that type of problem.

Later, as the material gets more manageable and you become more comfortable with it, there are increasing benefits to learning by problem solving. 

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Learning: Supply and Demand

Learning: Supply and Demand

There are two distinct points of difficulty in learning:

Failures of instruction. When instruction is omitted or insufficient, students struggle.

Failures of initiative. Without active engagement by the student, lessons may be wasted.

For learning to happen, there must be a sufficient supply of knowledge to make successfully acquiring skills possible. At the same time, if there’s no demand to use that knowledge learning is often superficial.

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The Bottom Line

Problems of knowledge demand come when you consume information and never use it. Collecting cookbooks instead of making meals. Buying a phrase book rather than speaking a language. Watching videos on YouTube instead of doing the real thing.

The best thing you can do to improve your learning is to have all three ingredients: instruction, practice, and feedback. If you’re lacking one of these, ask yourself how you might seek it out and structure it into your efforts to get better. Only when you have access to all three does it make sense to fine-tune the sequence.

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vikram

I'm a publisher and a podcaster

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