Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Base, Experiential and Inquiry-Based Teaching by Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller, Richard E. Clark

This article was a great selection. The authors raised some important issues regarding guided and unguided learning. They suggest that unguided learning can be detrimental to learning. They argued against PBL, inquiry based teaching, and constructivism in favor of a guided approach. The authors argue for direct instructional guidance and define it 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” (Kirschner, Sweller, Clark, 2006, p. 75).

The question that must be asked is there a time where unguided learning is an appropriate educational technique? If so, when?

Unguided Learning: When does it happen?

I would argue that unguided learning techniques can be effective in certain situations. We probably all engage in unguided learning everyday. When we go out search the Internet and click on a link that interests us or when we try a new food. Granted these are simple examples, but they are used to illustrate an experience has something to do with learning as we don't always a coach around to guide us towards the "correct" experience.

Novices vs. Experts

How many students here feel as though they are an expert in online education?

How many students feel that they are a novice in online education?

How many students feel that they are somewhere in between?

Cast your vote here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=720772683088

See results here:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/Report.asp?U=268308852045

I am willing to anticipate that many of us feel that we consider ourselves somewhere in between novice and expert. In the article, the authors focused their research on the use of unguided instruction with novices who had inadequate knowledge for thinking and learning.

Constructivism and Novices

I agree with the authors that novices may not have the prerequisite knowledge necessary to operate in a constructivist environment.

However, before we can discuss constructivist activities and constructivism we should all have some background knowledge. Go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_%28learning_theory%29 for an overview of constructivism.

Here are some examples of constructivist learning environments:

http://www.coe.missouri.edu/~jonassen/courses/CLE/

Think about a student trying to construct his own experience about chemistry who starts randomly mixing chemicals together. The outcome may be that the student causes an explosion, receives third degree burns and learns an important lesson through failure.

Of course mixing chemicals together randomly is unsafe and perhaps in a chemistry class the teacher would choose not to implement unguided learning techniques, especially if the students were novices. However, the “advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance” (Kirschner, Sweller, Clark, 2006, p. 75).

So the question to consider is what is the research on unguided instruction with students who are not novices? When should the use of unguided instruction be considered? Do you see a place for unguided instruction in your own work or research?