How Much Guidance Should a Project in a Teaching Article Give? Problem-First, Discovery, Scaffolding, and Project-Based Learning
In classroom studies, having students solve problems before instruction raises conceptual knowledge and transfer by about a third of a standard deviation on average, but every one of those studies had a teacher in the room; versions with group work had larger effects, except in interventions lasting only a few hours. A set of experiments that had roughly ten-year-olds solve first found the opposite. Unassisted discovery loses to explicit instruction, and discovery with scaffolding or feedback does better; no difference was detected between fading and not fading scaffolds. No study has tested one person reading an article and doing a project alone.