Nice and I sort of had a similar response even at the start of the school year in the principal playing this video you know you'd want to go into the classroom and say all right right how can I make things as open as possible and get students really in an unguided way exploring things like really being as creative. The impression I always had I think is that the research literature the body of literature and evidence and so on was very much on the side of this sort of mode of instruction that you know the more open and the more inquiry based and so on you can make it for students that the better. Can you talk a little bit about the research and what it says? Right

let's go through a few different steps here so firstly in terms of cognitive outcomes so we're talking about do people actually learn more when they have this kind of instruction and there is a fairly well-known I hope it's quite well-known paper called Why Minimally Guided Instruction Does Not Work which basically is just a review a summary of decades of research showing that when you have these kinds of things project based learning or discovery learning or it has she has a bunch of names yeah but when you have these kinds of things firstly it doesn't work very well for people to learn more under those conditions

that's been experimentally tested a number of times. So learning more more facts or what do we mean when we say learn more? Well it means both learning more facts and also being more capable of solving problems

so both both sort of small scale and large scale problem solving don't improve more as a result of this they it's actually improved more as a response to what you might consider more direct instruction or more in spongable approaches let's say yeah and there's actually some good theoretical reasons for this as well apart from all this experimental evidence it's got to do with something called cognitive load theory which is basically about the idea of not to want to go into this in too much depth right now but if you think of your your mind as composed of long-term memory so things you know and working memory so things you're thinking about then if you have too much stuff and you're working memory it gets overloaded and you and you can't think straight basically so what that means in a context like this if you give somebody a vague question and they don't have enough expertise to deal with it because they don't have much in their long-term memory then they have this this problem of choice this sometimes we can call it a combinatorial explosion of like well there are a thousand things to try and you got no idea which is the right thing and then you just don't make much progress because you don't know where you're going whereas when it's guided then actually people get taken along the right path and they can focus on on how to do things in a in a sensible way my

understanding