The Downside of Discovery Learning

I have long been a proponent and practitioner of discovery learning teaching methods such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL). With my continued reading of the Willingham book, that I recommended a few weeks ago and the subject of yesterday's blog post, I am learning to re-examine the theory and practice of PBL. Reason being, according to cognitive psychologists, students will remember what they think about. During the course of PBL if they find information that is erroneous or flat wrong and think about it, without proper judgement or evaluation as to its authenticity or relatedness to the problem being solved, students will remember it. This is not good because it means that a well intentioned student-centered pedagogy could do potential harm when students are remembering the wrong things that may impact their performance in the kitchen or boardroom later in life. So, the message today is to do guided discovery where the materials are selected ahead of time by the instructor so that when students search them and think about whether or not that information will help them solve the problem or complete the assignment it will be information that will be worth remembering.