6.1. The Worked Example Effect
What I used to think
I used to believe that worked examples had limited use, and it was important to get students practising on their own as quickly as possible. My reasoning was – at least in my own head – very sound. As a trainee teacher I was told of two cardinal sins: talking too much and not differentiating. A lesson crammed full of worked examples would fall victim to both of these. It would be me, the teacher, dominating the lesson, while my students passively moved through the lesson all at the same pace.
No, too much emphasis on worked examples was definitely a bad thing. Far better to whizz through a few and get students onto their own independent work as quickly as possible. That way, the high-flyers could race ahead, and I would be freed up to wander around the class and help the students who were struggling. Surely that was good – if not outstanding – teaching?
The problem was, many of the high-flyers were perhaps not flying quite as high as either they or I perceived them to be, becoming stuck as soon as things got a little tricky. Likewise, I ended up repeating the same things to the students who were struggling – things, in fact, that the whole class would probably have benefited from hearing.
Sources of inspiration
My takeaway
The ‘Worked Example Effect’ is the name given to the widely replicated finding that novice learners who try to learn by solving problems perform worse on subsequent test problems, including transfer problems different from the ones seen previously, than comparable learners who learn by studying equivalent worked examples (Sweller et al, 1998; Atkinson et al, 2000).
When I first came across this, I didn’t believe it. Surely you learn more from trying to solve problems than by just studying the solution? But the key is in the trying to solve problems. As we have seen in Section 4.5 on goal-free problems (and will revisit in Chapter 9), when novice learners try to solve problems they tend to do so using a cognitively demanding strategy that places a heavy burden upon their fragile working memory. They get so bogged down in the finer details of the problem that they are unable to appreciate more global issues, such as the problem’s deeper structure or the successful strategy they employed, thus inhibiting the ability of the learner to successfully process and then transfer the information into their long-term memory.
In contrast, studying a worked example reduces the burden on working memory, because the solution only has to be comprehended, not discovered. Moreover, worked examples direct attention – or, in other words, spare cognitive capacity in working memory – toward storing the essential relations between problem-solving moves. Hence, students learn to recognise which steps are required for particular problems, which is the basis for developing knowledge that can be transferred to other situations.
So, by moving students away from worked examples and on to problems to solve independently too soon, I was in danger of inhibiting their learning.
What I do now
Three things: