Designing for principle¶
Kind of goal · rules, causal models, explanations to be understood to be applied · All situations
26 rows from 26 pages say what to change when the brief's kind of goal is principle; 22 of them cite a claim. Pages whose rows cite claims come first. Read the basis before relying on a row: many carry a claim to learners or settings it did not test, and say so.
Ask Experts¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept, principle or transfer, not only a procedure |
Have the expert ask and prompt more and explain less; include one changed problem in each consultation for the learner to reason through aloud | Contingent scaffolding improves learning more than fixed or absent support. [+M] (interactive tutoring gave better transfer with similar immediate scores) and Human tutoring has a medium effect over no tutoring, and in one small study students learned as well when tutors only prompted them as when tutors also explained and gave feedback [~M] (eighth graders, circulatory system) |
Cultural & Life Experiences Connections¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is critical analysis or civic understanding (attitude-motivation, principle) |
Start from learners' own experience of the topic, then add readings and structured discussion that move it to systemic causes over several weeks; collect writing at the start and end | Positioning personal experience as an epistemic resource supports expansion from inward to outward critical orientations [+W] (69 students, 12th-grade English, one site); Agentic engagement with lively data supports epistemically just crisis sensemaking [+W] (four minority youth using their own and their community's experience as evidence beside official COVID-19 data; observed outside instruction, not a design) |
Debriefing¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is judgement, a concept or a principle (diagnostic reasoning, a negotiation, an ethical decision) |
Spend most of the time on the learners' reasoning at two or three decision points; end with the general rule stated in the learner's words and tested on a new case | Prompting learners to self-explain… [+M] (immediate tests, study of examples and text; carried to debriefs) |
Design tools so productive usage is guaranteed by affordances and constraints rather than instructions¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is open exploration of a concept or principle (a simulation) |
Constrain little: make productive actions obvious and leave free movement between parts; add challenges for continued engagement | Authors report that flexibility in sim access supports student agency while students tend to explore in a productive sequence [+W] (authors' belief; not tested) |
Digital Learning¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept, a principle, or transfer |
Keep answer-checking, but add explanation prompts and changed items; hold discussion of reasons in a live or threaded session | Prompting learners to self-explain improves understanding and problem solving on immediate tests by a moderate average amount, with little evidence yet on delayed or classroom gains. [+S] (not specific to digital delivery) |
Dual Coding¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Learners are adolescent or adult, goal is a principle in science or mathematics |
Add learner drawing of the process or system, with a model to compare against | Drawing in STEM [+M] (STEM only, abstract read) |
Engagement¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept or principle, measured by conceptual-understanding |
Judge success by an explanation or prediction probe, not by on-task time; make the engaged task one of explaining or predicting | Constructive learning beats active and passive learning [~M] (ordering only partly held in the field) |
Error Analysis¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
goal is a concept or principle with a known misconception |
Build one incorrect/correct pair around the misconception, require a written "why" explanation, and test with changed problems, not only the practised procedure. | erroneous examples [+M] (children, decimals, one session); productive failure [~M] (gain on conceptual, not procedural, outcomes) |
Experience with Languaging Activities (ELAs) guided by a sequence of experience-based questions¶
Pattern
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
The goal is understanding of a concept or principle in a course |
Write a content-specific step 4 prompt for each session and score the answer against the named idea; keep the number of reflections constant rather than adding more. | Specific reflection prompts [+S] (engineering undergraduates; school writing-to-learn studies) |
Guided Practice¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept, principle or transfer, not only a procedure |
Replace some feedback-giving with prompts that ask the learner to explain or predict the next step; include one changed item in each round | Human tutoring has a medium effect over no tutoring, and in one small study students learned as well when tutors only prompted them as when tutors also explained and gave feedback [~M] (eighth graders, 11 tutor–student pairs: prompting without feedback learned as well) |
Knowledge Organization¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is solving problems that use several principles (principle, near-transfer) |
Put the principles at the top and examples and procedures beneath them; test with problems that need two branches at once | A hierarchical organization facilitates tasks only when matched to the task domain [+M] (advanced high-school physics, two weeks) |
Mnemonic Device¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept, principle or transfer, not recall |
Teach the relationship first and test it with a changed case; use a mnemonic only for the labels the reasoning uses | Learning techniques have much smaller effects on deep learning and far transfer than on surface learning and near transfer [~M] (all ten techniques; only 109 of 1,619 effects measured deep outcomes) |
Modeling¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept or principle, or transfer, not only a procedure |
Model on two items that differ on the surface; at each pause ask why, not what; include one error and its repair, and ask learners what gave it away | Prompting learners to self-explain improves understanding and problem solving on immediate tests by a moderate average amount, with little evidence yet on delayed or classroom gains. [+S]; Erroneous examples improve conceptual understanding by forcing comparison with correct models. [+M] (grades 4–5, decimals, tutoring; carried to live modelling) |
Multimodal Instruction¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
The goal is a principle or concept in a mathematical or physical domain (how a quantity behaves) |
Add a dynamic or manipulable representation (simulation) and a learner-made sketch beside the symbolic form. Budget for higher effort while learners work. | Multiple representations [+M]: one undergraduate electrodynamics course; untested with children or outside physics |
Responsive Teaching¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept or principle with known misconceptions |
Use the contrast and confrontation moves first; re-observe with an item the misconception gets wrong | Erroneous examples improve conceptual understanding [+M]; Instruction that confronts science misconceptions [+M] |
Sequencing¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is conceptual understanding or transfer (a concept or principle), learners older than the early primary grades |
Put a short problem-solving attempt before instruction, then teach from learners' attempts; judge it on conceptual and transfer items, not on procedural ones | Productive Failure Improves Conceptual Learning [~S] (no difference on procedural knowledge; mostly mathematics and physics) |
Skills Sprint¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
The goal is a concept or principle learners have not met yet |
Teach it before the sprint, or use the sprint only as the application after instruction; check understanding unaided after the debrief, not only by the product | Minimal guidance is less effective for novices than explicit instruction [-S]; see Problem-based Learning for problem-first designs |
Structured Academic Controversy¶
Pattern
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is concept or principle knowledge of the topic, not argument |
Put the content check in the source pack and in step 8 (an individual item on the evidence itself). Do not assume discussion delivered the content. | structured discussion methods [~M]: only a minority of discussion approaches improved comprehension or critical thinking (general discussion, not SAC) |
Supporting Gifted and Talented Students¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
The target is cumulative (procedure, principle, as in mathematics or a language's grammar) |
Prefer acceleration: move to the next unit's content once the pre-check is passed, through adaptive or self-paced material with a teacher check each week | Intelligent tutoring systems improve achievement over non-individualised instruction [+M] (general populations, not gifted students); expertise reversal [+M] carried from training studies |
Teach response precision and new associations with minimal errors, using mediators and stimulus fading¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Target is a concept, principle or transfer to new problems, not a pairing or a tolerance |
Do not use this design; let learners attempt problems first and teach from their attempts, or use guided practice with explanation prompts | Productive Failure Improves Conceptual Learning [~S] (conceptual and transfer outcomes; reversed for second to fifth graders); The usefulness of induction and errorful learning varies with the type of terminal task being taught [+W] (conceptual analysis) |
Transfer of Learning¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a principle or concept to be used in new cases |
Pair cases and prompt comparison before stating the principle; test on new cases rather than definitions | Analogical Reasoning Improves Transfer [+S] (undergraduates, negotiation; meta-analysis across domains) |
Universal Design For Learning¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept or principle |
Pair a visual and a verbal representation of the same relation and ask learners to translate between them; feedback on the process, not only the answer | Multiple representations improve learning [+M] (undergraduate physics, one field study) and Adding relevant pictures or graphics to text improves learning from it, with a small pooled effect on reading comprehension, though whether dual coding explains the benefit is disputed [+S] (comprehension from text with graphics) |
Distributed Cognition¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is the learner's unaided understanding (concept, principle) for an individual exam |
Keep the reasoning steps with each learner; the shared representation records the group's results, not the reasoning; every learner writes some entries in their own words and takes a turn explaining the representation unaided | Untested proposal; writing into a shared artifact is argued, not shown, to deepen the writer's own knowledge (Externalizing knowledge into a wiki can itself produce individual learning through deeper processing [+W], theoretical); Among AI-exposed students, open collaboration predicted higher aggregate offloading, which was associated with lower Week 8 higher-order thinking (indirect estimate −0.34) [~M] (exploratory, one study, AI tool rather than peers) |
Game-based Learning¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
The goal is a concept, principle or complex-skill |
Make the core move the reasoning itself; add a debrief and one non-game transfer task; expect slower gains than for facts | untested; from the earlier page |
Gamification¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
Goal is a concept, principle or complex-skill |
Award points for correct explanations and for solving changed problems, not for speed; avoid timed, speed-ranked quiz rounds | untested; from the earlier page (timed leaderboard formats reward speed and suit fluency more than reasoning) |
Supporting Students with Intellectual Disabilities¶
Principle
| If the brief says… | Then change… | Basis |
|---|---|---|
The target is understanding a principle or using a skill in a new setting |
Do not rely on mnemonics; teach with concrete objects and the real setting, and check with a changed task the memorised steps would not solve | untested; the mnemonic claim's own page says benefits shrink for conceptual content |