Whatever You Do, Don’t Drop Practice

The only instructional element that really matters is practice with feedback.

That’s what a study that dropped instructional elements from different sections of a college course and compared the results shows.

Tom Crawford pointed me to Donald Clark’s post about the study by Martin, Klein, and Sullivan. (The study will be published in the British Journal of Educational Technology.)

The researchers were interested in which of some of Gagné’s nine events of instruction were most powerful in promoting learning: objectives, information, examples, practice with feedback, or review.

The researchers pretested 256 college students enrolled in a computer literacy course and divided them into low, medium, and high blocks on the basis of the pretest scores.

They then divided each block of students into six groups and randomly assigned each group to a different version of an instructional program:

o Full program (objectives + information + examples + practice with feedback + review).

o No objectives (objectives + information + examples + practice with feedback + review).

o No examples (objectives + information + examples + practice with feedback + review).

o No practice (objectives + information + examples + practice with feedback + review).

o No review (objectives + information + examples + practice with feedback + review).

o Information only (objectives + information + examples + practice with feedback + review).

In a nutshell, each of the four groups that had practice with feedback scored significantly higher on a posttest than the two groups that did not have practice with feedback.

(There were no significant differences on the posttest among the four groups that had practice with feedback, or between the two groups that didn’t have it.)

Also, on a 12-item attitude survey, the information-only group had the most negative attitudes compared to other groups, followed by the no-practice group (and then by the no-examples group).

It’s good to be a little cautious about such a study. For example, objectives may help the designer design good practice even though the presence of the objectives themselves may not have an effect (as the researchers point out).

But the study provides some proof that the one thing that we shouldn’t drop in an instructional situation is having the learners do things and get feedback on what they do.