Discovery learning

Jerome Bruner is often credited with originating discovery learning in the 1960s, but his ideas are very similar to those of earlier writers such as John Dewey.

Some studies show that students in discovery situations are more likely than those receiving direct instruction to encounter inconsistent or misleading feedback, encoding errors, causal misattributions, and inadequate practice and elaborations.

In these cases, direct instruction has been shown to be an efficient way to teach procedures that are difficult for students to discover on their own, such as those involved in geometry, algebra, and computer programming.

In pure discovery learning, the learner is required to discover new content through conducting investigations or carrying out procedures while receiving little, if any, assistance.

"For example, a science teacher might provide students with a brief demonstration of how perceptions of color change depending on the intensity of the light source and then ask them to design their own experiment to further examine this relationship".

Because students are left to self-discovery of topics, researchers worry that learning taking place may have errors, misconceptions or be confusing or frustrating to the learner.

[12] Research shows that cognitive demands required for discovery in young children may hinder learning as they have limited amounts of existing knowledge to integrate additional information.

Mayer (2004) argues that unassisted discovery learning tasks do not help learners discover problem-solving rules, conservation strategies, or programming concepts.

Alternatively, direct ‘instruction where working examples, scaffolding techniques, explicit explanation and feedback are beneficial to learning (Alfieri, 2011).

In addition, time spent practising newly learned concepts improves problem solving skills (Pas and Van Gog, 2006).

Fuchs et al. (2008) comment, Typically developing students profit from the general education mathematics program, which relies, at least in part, on a constructivist, inductive instructional style.

[14] Other researchers note that there is promising work being done in the field to incorporate constructivism and cooperative grouping so that curriculum and pedagogy can meet the needs of diverse learners in an inclusion setting.

According to Kirschner, Sweller and Clark (2006), guided instruction produces more immediate recall of facts than unguided approaches along with longer term transfer and problem-solving skills.

[18] Another aspect of enhanced discovery learning is allowing the learner to generate ideas about a topic along the way and then having students explain their thinking.