Anne Murphy Paul: Why Floundering Makes Learning Better | TIME Ideas | TIME.com.
Interesting:
With one group of students, the teacher provided strong “scaffolding” — instructional support — and feedback. With the teacher’s help, these pupils were able to find the answers to their set of problems. Meanwhile, a second group was directed to solve the same problems by collaborating with one another, absent any prompts from their instructor. These students weren’t able to complete the problems correctly. But in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when the two groups were tested on what they’d learned, the second group “significantly outperformed” the first.
Too often we race in to “help” when people are struggling. We give them answers when often all they need is a little guidance. This is especially true in formal education – often to an extreme degree with very young children. The desire to help them avoid frustration is perfectly natural, but it is how we learn. If we prevent this kind of learning by racing in to help to quickly (by, for example, providing too much “scaffolding”) the learning doesn’t stick, and, ultimately, the learners stop trying.
