Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Designing Winning Worked Examples 2 – Inter Example Features

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

One aspect of instructivist approaches that has intuitive appeal is the 'worked example'. This is where you show how a problem has been solved, in order to enable the learner to apply similar methods to solve similar problems. I've seen it applied in fields varying from math to physics to computer science to logic. In these domains, it seems to me, it works for some people, but poses an impenetrable mystery to others; logic students, for example, would wonder aloud how they should select which rule to apply, which isn't explained in worked examples (this is why I created the categorical Converter). In other domains, it defies reason to even be thinking in terms of worked examples at all. You can maybe apply worked examples if you think of subjects like geography, history or art as sciences with specific methods and measurements, but not everything is like physics. Philosophers learned this first; many educators, it appears, have yet to learn this.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 08:32 a.m.

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