Explicitly guide students to use contrasting cases as grounded feedback by prompting intuitive predictions¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

A forward-looking design recommendation drawn from the study's null result: because students in this experiment received no guidance on using the contrasting cases, the authors conclude that "novices often do not use the beneficial opportunities of contrasting cases when they are not explicitly guided to do so." They propose that future research should support students in utilizing the cases as grounded feedback by explicitly asking for intuitive predictions against which generated solution attempts are evaluated, and by drawing attention to the underlying principles the cases contrast. This strategy implements the knowledge-gap-awareness and deep-feature-discovery mechanisms of the PS-I framework.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Explicit guidance or prediction prompts during the problem-solving phase, since unguided contrasting cases showed no effect in this study.

Constraints¶

• Recommended on the basis of a null result and interpretation of prior work (Roll et al. 2012; Chin et al. 2016; Schwartz and Martin 2004); the guided version was not tested in this experiment.

Target Learners¶

• secondary education mathematics students (age 14–15) encountering a new statistical concept

Target Learning Goals¶

• conceptual understanding of variance and use of contrasting cases as grounded feedback on solution attempts

Affordances¶

• Three Mechanisms Productive Failure Ps I

Related Strategies¶

• Provide feedback in the problem-solving phase to foster negative knowledge and multiple solution attempts

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Loibl, K., Tillema, M., Rummel, N., & van Gog, T. (2020). The effect of contrasting cases during problem solving prior to and after instruction. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-020-09504-7