Toku science topic
Why understanding grows when children can plan, try, notice failure and change course.
Explore productive struggle, procedural flexibility, analogical reasoning and the difference between knowing a procedure and knowing how to solve a problem.
Manu Kapur · Instructional Science
Trying, comparing and even failing at plausible approaches can prepare learners to understand later explanation more deeply when the task is well designed.
In the studied mathematical setting, students who first generated and explored solution attempts before instruction developed stronger conceptual understanding and transfer on later assessments.
Marci S. DeCaro · Memory & Cognition
Good practice should build fluency without teaching children that every problem has to be attacked in exactly the same way.
Repeated exposure to one procedure can create a mental set that makes learners less likely to notice a more efficient strategy and can constrain later flexibility.
Bert Jonsson, Carina Granberg & Johan Lithner · Frontiers in Psychology
Mathematical learning can benefit when children have to construct or justify a route rather than only imitate a supplied procedure.
Students practising with creative mathematical reasoning showed advantages on later mathematical performance compared with more imitative algorithmic practice in the reported work.
Annie Brookman-Byrne et al. · Mind, Brain, and Education
Seeing relationships and using analogy are part of the cognitive toolkit children draw on when solving unfamiliar science and mathematics problems.
Analogical and matrix reasoning made distinct contributions to science and mathematics problem-solving performance in the studied adolescents.