David Willingham:

Lena Welch asks whether Kirschner, Sweller & Clark (2006), (which is still available for open download here https://www.tandfonline.com/d…/abs/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1) is a consensus view....here's my take

This was and remains a very influential article. It both reviews experimental evidence showing poor outcomes for discovery learning and provides a principled argument for why those outcomes make sense, in light of the cognitive architecture, overloading working memory being a key problem.

Rich Mayer addressed the same type of learning with his influential "Three Strikes" paper in 2004, which you can download here: https://app.nova.edu/…/instru…/edd8124/fall11/2004-Mayer.pdf

An important distinction is that this article examines discovery learning *with minimal guidance*. This means you more or less give kids some materials, tell them the goal, and let them try to figure it out. For example, in an influential paper from 2004, David Klahr showed students a ramp and ball with different features (surface texture, weight) and asked kids to figure out which features made the ball go far. The idea was to see if they figured out the importances of isolating variables. The comparison got direct instruction in the idea, with examples and they were more likely to get it.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40064024…

Critics say this sort of minimal guidance is unrealistic because no one implements discovery learning that way. I think that's not true--some people absolutely have advocated for pure discovery.

But it's also true that discovery with *some* guidance is not the same thing. A recent article compared direct instruction, pure discovery, and discovery with guidance, and concluded the last of these is superior to the other two.

https://www.tandfonline.com/…/…/10.1080/00220671.2014.899958

The "best of both worlds" idea is that you get the benefit of deep processing, motivation, and interest because kids are generating their own explanations and understandings....but the guidance is important because it leads kids to draw those conclusions.

My take has always been this: from a cognitive point of view that makes sense. But I think discovery with guidance is much harder for the teacher to pull off than direct instruction. You need to understand where kids' understanding is *in the moment* and say or do something to nudge them (not tell them) in the right direction. It takes a lot of experience and skill.

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Guided Instruction Improves Elementary Student Learning and Self-Efficacy in Science

Carolyn J. Hushman &Scott C. Marley

The authors investigated whether the amount of instructional guidance affects science learning and self-efficacy. Sixty 9- and 10-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of the following three instructional conditions: (a) guided instruction consisting of examples and student-generated explanations, (b) direct instruction consisting of a lecture and examples, and (c) minimal instruction consisting of student directed discovery. Children who received guided instruction designed a greater percentage of experiments correctly and self-reported greater changes in science self-efficacy than children in the other conditions. No statistically significant differences were observed between direct and guided instruction on outcome measures of cued recall, application and evaluation. However, both conditions performed statistically higher on these outcome measures relative to the minimal instruction condition.

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