ntmbayfield / guided-instruction

some reading, notes and examples of my interpretation of guided instruction and worked examples for DBC challenges

guided instruction and worked examples

some reading, notes and examples of my interpretation guided instruction and worked examples for DBC challenges

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students often say they would like to see an example of a solution and we resist.

we say that we don't want students to reinforce the notion that there is only one solution to a problem. we want them to see software development more as a process of developing their craft rather than following a procedure towards finishing a jigsaw puzzle.

we also wonder whether some students will be limited by a single answer, the "right" answer, and give up on exploring different perspectives on the same problem.

there's some research out there that suggests that leaving novices stranded early in the learning process may be harmful to their progress, or at least suboptimal, and that only experts benefit from unstructured challenges that force them to explore solutions while drawing on their previous experience.

i'd say a lot of this depends entirely on the definition of novice and expert, but what if we start with the hypothesis that all students are novices at the beginning of their respective phase and are experts by the end (3 weeks later)? that's pretty absurd but let's run with it -- it's summertime and the sun is shining outside.

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Richard Clark writes:

On one side of this argument are those who believe that all people -— novices and experts alike —- learn best when provided with instruction that contains unguided or partly guided segments. This is generally defined as instruction in which learners, rather than being presented with all essential information and asked to practice using it, must discover or construct some or all of the essential information for themselves. On the other side are those who believe that ideal learning environments for experts and novices differ: while experts often thrive without much guidance, nearly everyone else thrives when provided with full, explicit instructional guidance (and should not be asked to discover any essential content or skills).

Our goal in this article is to put an end to this debate. Decades of research clearly demonstrate that for novices (comprising virtually all students), direct, explicit instruction is more effective and more efficient than partial guidance. So, when teaching new content and skills to novices, teachers are more effective when they provide explicit guidance accompanied by practice and feedback, not when they require students to discover many aspects of what they must learn. As we will discuss, this do: es not mean direct, expository instruction all day every day. Small group and independent problems and projects can be effective—not as vehicles for making discoveries, but as a means of practicing recently learned content and skills.

further, leaving students to their own devices, intuitively curating (potentially ineffective) content and sharing cargo-cult practices among themselves may be wasting valuable time for new learners

Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education:

What we may actually be seeing is a generation where learners at the computer behave as butterflies fluttering across the information on the screen, touching or not touching pieces of information (i.e., hyperlinks), quickly fluttering to a next piece of information, unconscious to its value and without a plan. This butterfly defect was first signaled by Salomon and Almog (1998). Learners are seduced (Harp & Mayer, 1997; Mayer, 2005) into clicking the links, often forgetting what they are looking for. This "fluttering" leads—at best—to a very fragile network of knowledge. Many a quest ends in a quagmire of possibly interesting but irrelevant pieces of information

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in an attempt to to address these concerns, this repository includes a set of simple challenges and links to recorded walkthroughs (ie, worked examples) to show the same problem solved several different ways.

the hope is that exposing students to this kind of structured work will help them develop a sense of discernment: how to start, what to try, when to stop, when to conduct research, etc.

the question remains: is this useful?