I recently wrote a blogpost for Think Forward Educators on worked examples. Enjoy the snippet below or read the full thing here.
If you put a problem in front of a student that involves new or novel information or skills that you are not expecting them to know, either they solve the problem (with time and lots of effort, by chance, or because they have been shown by someone else), or they can't solve the problem in which case we need to show them how.
We can streamline this process by showing students how to solve the problem from the get-go. This avoids, in extreme cases, the "guess what's in my head" game where students blindly guess because they have no clue, as well as possibly disenfranchising students who (rightly) don't know how to complete the problem when other students are able to (possibly from being shown beforehand). We can show students how to do something by using a worked example.
The worked example effect describes how we can enhance learning "by studying worked examples to problems rather than by trying to solve the original problems" (Ayres, 2012). We use worked examples to leverage the knowledge of experts who know how to complete a skill to show a novice how to complete that same skill. This involves breaking the skill into clear, concise, and manageable steps that the novice can then replicate.
Read the rest of this blogpost here.
We can streamline this process by showing students how to solve the problem from the get-go. This avoids, in extreme cases, the "guess what's in my head" game where students blindly guess because they have no clue, as well as possibly disenfranchising students who (rightly) don't know how to complete the problem when other students are able to (possibly from being shown beforehand). We can show students how to do something by using a worked example.
The worked example effect describes how we can enhance learning "by studying worked examples to problems rather than by trying to solve the original problems" (Ayres, 2012). We use worked examples to leverage the knowledge of experts who know how to complete a skill to show a novice how to complete that same skill. This involves breaking the skill into clear, concise, and manageable steps that the novice can then replicate.
Read the rest of this blogpost here.