The Biggest Lever You Can Pull to Make Learning Fun is to Not Overwhelm the Learner

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Nothing succeeds like success.

One of the most effective ways to motivate students is to set up their practice conditions so that they are doing challenging tasks but succeeding in doing them – smoothly, without much struggle.

The biggest lever you can pull to make learning fun is to not overwhelm the learner. Don’t lower the overall bar for success, but scaffold the practice so that the student successfully clears higher and higher bars until they’re doing the real thing.

No matter how many funny jokes you crack, how many cool applications of math you show off, how much social interaction takes place in class, how excited you get students about math-heavy careers… none of that matters if the material feels overwhelmingly difficult to learn.

How do you avoid overwhelming a student without lowering the bar for success?

1) Start at a point where they’re solid on their foundations – this may mean starting at the bottom of some knowledge holes.

2) Provide enough review to keep them solid on those foundations as well as any new material they learn. (You can’t build on foundations that are crumbling away!)

3) Present new material that is broken up into bite-size pieces with a high degree of guidance and scaffolding – in particular, with a series of worked examples, each worked example followed by active problem-solving on problems of that type.

The example & problems should start out covering the simplest possible case, and then gradually ramp up in difficulty and generality as the student successfully solves problems in the simpler cases.

Every single problem should include feedback – whether the student solved it correctly, and if not, what should they do differently to succeed on the next attempt.

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