Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching 

Paul A. Kirschner 

Educational Technology Expertise Center Open University of the Netherlands Research Centre Learning in Interaction Utrecht University, The Netherlands 

John Sweller 

School of Education University of New South Wales Richard E. 

Clark Rossier 

School of Education University of Southern California 

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. Although 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. 

Disputes about the impact of instructional guidance during teaching have been ongoing for at least the past half-century (Ausubel, 1964; Craig, 1956; Mayer, 2004; Shulman & Keisler, 1966). 

On one side of this argument are those advocating the hypothesis that people learn best in an unguided or minimally guided environment, generally defined as one in which learners, rather than being presented with essential information, must discover or construct essential information for themselves (e.g., Bruner, 1961; Papert, 1980; Steffe & Gale, 1995). 

On the other side are those suggesting that novice learners should be provided with direct instructional guidance on the concepts and procedures required by a particular discipline and should not be left to discover those procedures by themselves (e.g., Cronbach & Snow, 1977; Klahr & Nigam, 2004; Mayer, 2004; Shulman & Keisler, 1966; Sweller, 2003). 

Direct instructional guidance is defined as providing information that fully explains the concepts and procedures that students are required to learn as well as learning strategy support that is compatible with human cognitive architecture. 

Learning, in turn, is defined as a change in long-term memory. 

The minimally guided approach has been called by various names including 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), and constructivist learning (Jonassen, 1991; Steffe & Gale, 1995). 

Examples of applications of these differently named but essentially pedagogically equivalent approaches includescience instruction in which students are placed in inquiry learning contexts and asked to discover the fundamental and well-known principles of science by modeling the investigatory activities of professional researchers (Van Joolingen, de Jong, Lazonder, Savelsbergh, & Manlove, 2005). 

Similarly, medical students in problem-based teaching courses are required to discover medical solutions for common patient problems using problem-solving techniques (Schmidt, 1998, 2000). 

There seem to be two main assumptions underlying instructional programs using minimal guidance. 

First they challenge students to solve “authentic” problems or acquire complex knowledge in information-rich settings based on the assumption that having learners construct their own solutions leads to the most effective learning experience. 

Second, they appear to assume that knowledge can best be acquired through experience based on the procedures of the discipline (i.e., seeing the pedagogic content of the learning experience as identical to the methods and processes or epistemology of the discipline being studied; Kirschner, 1992). 

Minimal guidance is offered in the form of process- or task-relevant information that is available if learners choose to use it. 

Advocates of this approach imply that instructional guidance that provides or embeds learning strategies in instruction interferes with the natural processes by which learners draw on their unique prior experience and learning styles to construct new situated knowledge that will achieve their goals. 

According toWickens (1992, cited in Bernstein, Penner, Clarke-Stewart, Roy, & Wickens, 2003), for example, 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. (p. 221) 

This constructivist argument has attracted a significant following. The goal of this article is to suggest that based on our current knowledge of human cognitive architecture, minimally guided instruction is likely to be ineffective. 

The past half-century of empirical research on this issue has provided overwhelming and unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning.

Source : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1?needAccess=true