Psychology Commons^™

Exploratory Learning Using Consistency Problems: Activity Type Matters, Madison E Clark, Campbell Rightmyer Bego, Derek K. Mcclelland, Marci S. Decaro

Undergraduate Arts and Research Showcase

Studies have shown that exploration before instruction can improve learning. Students (N= 197) from the psychology participant pool were taught the concept and procedure of standard deviation in one of four conditions. Students were given both direct instruction and a problem to solve in one of two orders: instruction-first, or exploration-first. During the problem-solving activity, students were asked to determine the consistency of a set of numbers. This dataset was set up as a rich dataset, or to highlight contrasting cases. Students then completed a posttest. We compared mean posttest scores to find that exploration before instruction led …