Archive for October 18, 2014
Learners don’t know what’s best for them
Annie Murphy Paul has a nice article about autodidacts — yes, there are some, but most of us aren’t. MOOCs are mostly for autodidacts. The paper from Educational Psychologist is excellent, and I reading the original as well as Paul’s review.
In a paper published in Educational Psychologist last year, Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer of Maastricht University and Paul A. Kirschner of the Open University of the Netherlands challenge the popular assumption “that it is the learner who knows best and that she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning.”
There are three problems with this premise, van Merriënboer and Kirschner write. The first is that novices, by definition, don’t yet know much about the subject they’re learning, and so are ill equipped to make effective choices about what and how to learn next. The second problem is that learners “often choose what they prefer, but what they prefer is not always what is best for them;” that is, they practice tasks that they enjoy or are already proficient at, instead of tackling the more difficult tasks that would actually enhance their expertise. And third, although learners like having some options, unlimited choices quickly become frustrating—as well as mentally taxing, constraining the very learning such freedom was supposed to liberate.
via Ed tech promoters need to understand how most of us learn | The Hechinger Report.
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