Thursday, July 12, 2012

Why Floundering Is Good | Psychology Today

Why Floundering Is Good | Psychology Today:


Yes!  I have ammunition now. :)  but My students may not like this but it fits exactly what I have said since even before I started teaching.     (thanks to Farnam Street for pointing this one out!

"...it’s better to let the neophytes wrestle with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start. In a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Kapur and a co-author, Katerine Bielaczyc, applied the principle of productive failure to mathematical problem solving in three schools in Singapore."

and later:

"First, choose problems to work on that “challenge but do not frustrate.” Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they’re doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions to the problems. And to those students and workers who protest this tough-love teaching style: you’ll thank me later."

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