Strategies for Targeting the Learning of Complex Skills Like Experimentation to Different Student Levels: The Intermediate Constraint Hypothesis

Designing Activities to Teach Higher-Order Skills: How Feedback and Constraint Affect Learning of Experimental Design

“…The variation between classes may indicate that different populations would benefit from different amounts of feedback and constraint. As we argue elsewhere ( Meir, 2022 ), changing the level of constraint in the learning environment might be a particularly powerful lever to adjust activities to maximize student learning for different populations.…”

“…, 2018 ) which had a much less constrained experimental design activity without any feedback. In our iterative testing of various learning modules with individual students and classes, we have found that by adding some constraints to an activity while still retaining much of the open-ended nature of a learning environment, as we have done in UED, we are able to devise algorithms to automatically provide specific feedback ( Meir, 2022 ). Our results here show this is worth doing as the feedback clearly improves student performance and, we infer, student learning.…”

“…The evolution and justification of choices made in the tutorial and its predecessors are elaborated on elsewhere ( Clarke-Midura et al. , 2018 ; Meir, 2022 ). Here we provide a brief description of UED as it was presented to participants in this study.…”

“…, 2007; Meir et al. , 2019 ; Meir, 2022 ). Here we ask how these two axes of active learning, feedback, and degree of constraint, may affect learning experimental design, a skill that is complex, difficult, and core to biology (and all sciences).…”

“…In considering how these three characteristics might theoretically influence the effectiveness of activities ( Nehm, 2019 ), we note that the presence, type, and timing of feedback are often dependent on the amount of constraint, as is the per-student instructor effort. That is, providing timely feedback is often only possible when an activity is highly constrained, or at least thoughtfully constrained at some intermediate level ( Meir, 2022 ). Activities where the interaction is highly constrained, such as through multiple choice questions, can easily provide immediate feedback to the learner, with a low level of per-student instructor effort.…”