Time to Put a Stake Through the Heart of the Undead Constructivist Learning Vampire

CT sent in this 2007 paper about Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.

For the past 50 years or so, the field of education has been dominated by the belief that direct, explicit instruction is harmful, and as a result ever since the 1960's education leaders have favoured teaching techniques that use minimal guidance. Unfortunately for these educators, empirical research kept providing solid evidence that their minimal guidance techniques weren't working as well as direct instruction. Before long, whatever term the educators were using at the time for their pet approach got changed to a different name but kept on going. Thus, discovery learning gave way to experiential learning, which in turn gave way to problem-based learning, which gave way to inquiry learning, which gave way to the currently-used term "constructivist learning". And every time, the newly-fired up passionate advocates of the latest recycled approach appear to be unaware of its long history of failure!

Back then, it was understandable that educators should endorse minimal guidance techniques when they were first proposed because at that time "the structures and relations that constitute human cognitive architecture had not yet been mapped. We are now in a quite different environment because we know much more about the structures, functions, and characteristics of working and long-term memory; the relations between them and their consequences for learning and problem solving. This new understanding has been the basis for systematic research and development of instructional theories that reflect our current understanding of cognitive architecture. This work should be central to the design of effective, guided instruction."

Unfortunately, constructivist educators continue to believe that too much guidance will impair later performance, because the students' ability to retrieve correct responses from memory on their own will be impaired and because learners best remember new information if they construct their own solutions as opposed to being told how. The advances in cognitive science - in particular the new understanding of the critical importance of long-term memory in human cognition - show this type of thinking to be nonsense. Here's why.

"Our understanding of the role of long-term memory in human cognition has altered dramatically over the last few decades. It is no longer seen as a passive repository of discrete, isolated fragments of information that permit us to repeat what we have learned. Nor is it seen only as a component of human cognitive architecture that has merely peripheral influence on complex cognitive processes such as thinking and problem solving. Rather, long-term memory is now viewed as the central, dominant structure of human cognition. Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our long-term memory....The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned."

Working memory, on the other hand, is very limited and very transitory. But when working memory can access previously-learned information stored in long-term memory, its limitations disappear. "Any instructional theory that ignores the limits of working memory when dealing with novel information or ignores the disappearance of those limits when dealing with familiar information is unlikely to be effective. Recommendations advocating minimal guidance during instruction proceed as though working memory does not exist or, if it does exist, that it has no relevant limitations when dealing with novel information, the very information of interest to constructivist teaching procedures. We know that problem solving, which is central to one instructional procedure advocating minimal guidance, called inquiry-based instruction, places a huge burden on working memory....

"Furthermore, that working memory load does not contribute to the accumulation of knowledge in long-term memory because while working memory is based used to search for problem solutions, it is not available and cannot be used to learn. Indeed, it is possible to search for extended periods of time with quite minimal alterations to long-term memory....

"After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique. In so far as there is any evidence from controlled studies, it almost uniformly supports direct, strong instructional guidance rather than constructivist-based minimal guidance during the instruction of novice to intermediate learners. Even for students with considerable prior knowledge, strong guidance while learning is most often found to be equally effective as unguided approaches. Not only is unguided instruction normally less effective, there is also evidence that it may have negative results when students acquire misconceptions or incomplete or disorganized knowledge."

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