Why advice on task selection may hamper learning in on-demand education

Abstract

In on-demand education, learners are required to plan their own learning trajectory by selecting suitable learning tasks. A positive effect on learning is expected when learners select tasks that help them fulfil their individual learning needs. However, the selection of suitable tasks is a difficult process for learners with little domain knowledge and suboptimal task-selection skills. A common solution for helping learners deal with on-demand education and develop domain-specific skills is to give them advice on task selection. In a randomized experiment, learners (N = 30) worked on learning tasks in the domain of system dynamics and received either advice or no advice on the selection of new learning tasks. Surprisingly, the no-advice group outperformed the advice group on a post-test measuring domain-specific skills. It is concluded that giving advice on task selection prevents learners from thinking about how the process of task selection works. The advice seems to supplant rather than support their considerations why they should perform the advised task, which results in negative effects on learning. Implications for future research on giving advice in on-demand education are discussed.

Self-regulation of secondary school students: self-assessments are inaccurate and insufficiently used for learning-task selection

“…Actually, our results suggest that asking for JOLs does not have additional benefits to asking for performance ratings, because the difference between these measures was 0 in 74.17% of all cases, which means participants gave the same estimate for actual performance and JOL on nearly 75% of all tasks. Our findings are in agreement with other studies reporting that (unguided) self-assessments are of low quality (e.g., Boud and Falchikov 1989;Dunning et al 2003;Kostons et al 2010;Panadero and Alonso-Tapia 2013;Taminiau et al 2013), and that the process responsible for poor self-assessments might also be responsible for poor learning-task selection. That is, according to the cue-utilization approach, different cues have different effects on the accuracy of self-assessments (Koriat 1997).…”

“…All other reasons for content selections were based on personal interest, mostly by indicating that a certain topic seemed fun or interesting. These results support other studies that based task-selection advice on similar ideas (Kicken et al 2009;Kostons et al 2010;Taminiau et al 2013;Van Gog et al 2010). In these studies, the four-component instructional design (4C/ID) model (Van Merriënboer and Kirschner 2013) was used to design the structure of the task databases and to design advice on task selection, and the results were mixed.…”

“…Specifically, modeling by a teacher of self-assessment and task-selection skills can lead to higher performance, but not always more than mere practice (Kostons et al 2012;Van Gog et al 2010). Also, providing taskselection advice might even hamper the learning of task-selection skills (Taminiau et al 2013). On the other hand, results from other studies do suggest that self-assessment skills can be improved through guidance (e.g., Andrade 2010; Panadero and Alonso-Tapia 2013), and that task-selection advice could improve task selections (Kicken et al 2009).…”

“…Specifically, studies in which modeling examples provided the advice were successful in helping students to acquire these skills (Kostons et al 2012;Van Gog et al 2010). However, other studies in which the advice was provided on-demand in textual form (Taminiau et al 2013) or through supervision meetings and electronic portfolios (Kicken et al 2009) were less successful.…”

“…Regardless of the name, a moment-to-moment assessment is considered to be more accurate than a global judgement (Eva and Regehr 2011). In the current study, we decided to stay in line with most other studies on self-assessment and task selection by using the term self-assessment for the assessment of individual tasks (e.g., Kicken et al 2009;Kostons et al 2010Kostons et al , 2012Taminiau et al 2013). Self-assessments are a crucial part of self-regulated learning (Andrade 2010;Panadero and Alonso-Tapia 2013).…”