Students learn faster when they see what something is and what it isn’t. One of the most important aspect of curriculum planning + instructional design is effectively using examples and non-examples. 🧵⬇️
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
Been re-reading Theory of Instruction through a lens of what we know about learning from the last 50 years and really realising the brilliance of it in terms of how it incorporates so much of how learning happens.
It's not an easy read but for me the core concept in it is "faultless communication": the idea that teaching should be designed so precisely that misunderstanding is impossible.
One of the mad things about this aspect of DI is that it's almost a unified theory of learning in the sense that so many theorists from a range of different traditions have advocated for it in one form or another.
Socrates, Aristotle, Vygotsky, Bruner, Skinner, Ausubel, Sweller all basically say the same thing on this which is that learning is driven by clear distinctions—knowing what something is requires knowing what it isn’t. It's really about concept refinement but done in an incredibly detailed way.
A key idea is that students need to see only relevant contrasts not arbitrary differences. In other words, when teaching a concept, the differences shown to a student should highlight the specific quality that defines that concept.
A non-example should be almost identical to the example, differing only in the defining feature otherwise, students might focus on the wrong thing. Engelmann and Carnine developed five principles to do this:
Comments