As a trainee I spent hours observing teachers and getting ideas from colleagues/lecturers/twitter about how to make lessons “fun” and so much of what I came across talked about “getting students to solve it for themselves”. I think, on some level, it makes sense why this is so appealing to teachers: there will come a point where we’re no longer able to teach our students, so when that time comes we want to know they’ll be able to teach themselves. It was only when I came across the seminal paper from Clark, Kirschner, & Sweller: Putting Students on the Path to Learning that I realised the mistakes in that approach. It’s not to say that giving students minimal support is “bad”, just as always using worked examples isn’t “good”, the discussion is far more nuanced than that. One of the most powerful things about the Clark et al. paper is that it does exactly that, it avoids exclusive binary and instead outlines an approach that puts trust in classroom teachers to know what to do best. So, how can we make worked examples work for us?
1. Novice learners benefit most from worked examples
Constantly using worked examples can be unhelpful, and (as we’ll see) can end up doing more harm than good. But, when done well, they’re absolutely fantastic for novice learners. In order to understand this, let’s first define novice learners:
Novice learners aren’t just “new” students or low-prior attaining students, they are any student for whom the knowledge being taught to them is new.
This includes students who may have been exposed to the learning previously, but have forgotten so much of it that it can be effectively considered as new learning.
From the above it’s fairly clear that the majority of our students would fall under “novice” for any given lesson as it’s unlikely we’re teaching them things they already know! So why are worked examples so useful for these students? Let’s consider an analogy: we’re about to start our first driving lesson. We have no prior experience of driving, but we get in the car ready to learn. The instructor sat next to us simply says, “Show me how you’d change gears when driving”. For those of us who do drive I’m sure you can appreciate how daunting a task this could be on your first ever lesson, and for those of us who don’t it’s even easier to imagine the feelings we might experience in that situation! The point is this is what it feels like to be a novice confronted with a new situation: we have absolutely no idea what all the pedals and buttons do let alone demonstrate changing gear!
In an alternate reality our instructor models exactly what we need to do: pressing the clutch, moving the gear stick, and releasing the clutch whilst narrating the process. We practice doing this a few times with the car turned off. In this reality, we have the right scaffolds in place to make sure we know exactly what we need to do. It may look like we haven’t really “learnt how to change gear” and we’re just following a procedure and there is indeed some truth to it. But this is exactly the point!
Takeaway: Telling students exactly what they need to do is helpful when starting out.
2. Our brains aren’t wired for school
As outlined by Daniel Willingham, “thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain” [1]. When faced with problems that are too hard students will often just opt-out, but more importantly will likely learn very little. This is what we see in our first reality. In that scenario it’s a) unlikely that we’ll figure out what to do by luck and b) on the off-chance that we do figure it out, our brains are so occupied with trying to “guess” our way through the problem that there’s a high chance we wouldn’t actually retain how we did it so wouldn’t be able to do it again! In other words the limited capacity of our working memory (where we do our thinking [2]) is overwhelmed because they are seeing this problem for the first time and have no prior knowledge to help them make sense of it [3].
By providing scaffolds, we ease that burden on working memory. Instead of thinking capacity being used up on figuring out what we need to do, we can instead devote the resources to making sense of the procedure that’s already been shown to us. This is why “just following a procedure” is such a great starting point when working with novices.
Takeaway: Worked examples allow thinking resources to be devoted to making sense of a given procedure rather than also having to figure it out, reducing the burden placed on our limited working memory capacity.
3. As we develop expertise, the reverse becomes true
Does this mean we continually just keep giving students worked examples? Definitely not! As mentioned, the discussion is far more nuanced than this. Firstly we want students to achieve some level of independence and that won’t happen without carefully removing the scaffolding we’ve put in place. Secondly, we want to avoid the “expertise reversal effect”: whilst worked examples can prove incredibly helpful for novices, the reverse is true when expertise gets developed [4]. Going back to our driving analogy: imagine if after many rounds of practice and lessons we’ve clearly got the hang of how to change gears, but our instructor still insists on exemplifying it to us each time we start the lesson we’d likely get frustrated because we feel like we’re being held back.
A reason this can happen is as we develop expertise we start relying on our own thinking to unpick the problem. In a situation where our thinking is developed and we’re still being given worked examples our attention is being split between trying to decipher the problem using our own thinking and focusing on the information from the worked example [5]: we’re either having to drown out the explanation so we can focus on our own thinking, or consciously hold back our own thinking so we can pay attention to the explanation. In either situation we’re placing more demand on our mental resources without it being relevant to the problem at hand.
Takeaway: Worked examples can become an unnecessary burden on mental resources if they are not removed appropriately.
4. Into the classroom
Having looked at the theory behind when worked examples can be helpful/harmful allows us to make better use of them within our lessons. The EEF’s FAME approach provides a great starting point for this.
Principle 1: Start with fully worked examples
When introducing a new concept or one that students are likely to have forgotten (i.e. when students can be considered “novices”), we should use fully scaffolded examples [6]. We want to draw students’ attention to the key concepts/procedures that we’re explaining by limiting the amount of things we’re asking them to attend to, and being clear and succinct in our explanations. This can be aided by using concrete examples of abstract ideas [7] (e.g. rather than just providing a definition of a polygon, show students some concrete examples) as well as non-examples [8] (e.g. explicitly demonstrating why a circle doesn’t fit in the definition of polygon).
We can also use the “Explanation” part of the FAME approach, by prompting students to self-explain what’s going on in each step and why that is the case [9].
Principle 2: Provide students with scaffolds
Prior to transitioning to fully independent practice we can provide students with some scaffolds to more gradually increase the level of difficulty, making the change more manageable – like stabilisers on a bicycle. One way of doing this is through fading [10], where we slowly remove certain steps of working one (or a few) at a time:
There is some evidence that suggests removing in reverse order (starting from the final step required) can be more beneficial for students [11]. In doing this students are still having to think hard about the learning, but we are managing that load carefully to minimise the chances of them becoming overwhelmed.
We could also use example problem pairs [12]. This is where we provide students with a very similar question to the one we’ve modelled with only minimal changes, such as the example below:
In this strategy they have to execute the whole procedure by themselves, but they have the support of being able to see a fully-worked example at the same time which can prevent them from having to hold the previous answer in their mind whilst working out a new one. In situations where there are a number of steps involved we can adopt the Alternation aspect [13] of the FAME approach by introducing small parts of the whole procedure gradually, before bringing it all together.
Principle 3: Use whole-class response systems to check when students are ready for independent practice
Having used fully and partially guided examples, we could then use techniques such as mini-whiteboards or hinge-point questions [14] to see if there are any remaining misconceptions or mistakes in students’ working. This will allow us to either provide quick feedback to correct any mistakes/misunderstanding and then gauge whether we need to: a) go back and reteach if a high rate of errors continues, b) move students on to independent work if we a high rate of correct responses is seen, or c) move on those students who were correct whilst supporting those students for whom certain mistakes were still persisting. We can also use the Mistakes aspect [15] of the FAME approach to extend and provide additional challenge for those students who need it. We can display intentionally incorrect solutions and ask students to spot and correct the error(s) present.
Finally, all of these ideas are designed to direct students’ attention to what we want to achieve right now, so what underpins all of this is clarity of purpose. Being clear about things like if we want students to follow a procedure, to execute it, to recognise it, or to apply it in an unfamiliar context is crucial in deciding how much support they’ll need initially, and how quickly it can be removed.
[1] Willingham, D. T. (2021). Why don't students like school?: A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. John Wiley & Sons. p.10 [2] Willingham, D. T. (2021). [3] Clark, R., Kirschner, P. A., & Sweller, J. (2012). Putting students on the path to learning: The case for fully guided instruction. American Educator, 36(1), 5-11. [4] Clark, Kirschner, & Sweller. (2012). [5] Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2003). The Expertise Reversal Effect. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 23-31. [6] Clark, Kirschner, & Sweller. (2012). [7] The Learning Scientists. (2016). Learn to Study Using... Concrete Examples. https://www.learningscientists.org/blog/2016/8/25-1 [8] Open University Mathematics Education. (2019). Using Examples in the Maths Classroom. http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/MathEd/index.php/2019/11/26/using-examples-in-the-classroom/#:~:text=Even%20outside%20of%20mathematics%2C%20it,et%20al.%2C%202006)%20. [9] Education Endowment Foundation. (2022). Using Worked Examples to Support High Quality Teaching; The FAME Approach. https://d2tic4wvo1iusb.cloudfront.net/eef-guidance-reports/science-ks3-ks4/Worked_Examples_-_FAME.pdf [10] ibid [11] ibid [12] McCrea, E. (2019). Making Every Maths Lesson Count: Six principles to support great maths teaching (Making Every Lesson Count series). Crown House Publishing Ltd. [13] Education Endowment Foundation. (2022). [14] STEM Learning. (n.d.). Assessment for Learning: Hinge Point Questions. https://www.stem.org.uk/assessment-for-learning#:~:text=Hinge%20Point%20Questions%20are%20diagnostic,students%20need%20to%20do%20next. [15] Education Endowment Foundation. (2022).