- When teachers are not physically present with the student, they cannot easily engage in the kind of joint attention required for a high-quality Socratic discussion that enables students to make good, independent sense of the content—also known as “essential overload.”
- Students are often distracted by a novel task and not focused on the content itself.
- Big projects are often a form of massed practice—“This week is all about titration!” Massed practice is inferior to distributed practice for long-term mastery.
- By assigning several smaller tasks (also known as “segmenting”), students are more likely to be independently successful at the tasks.
- When teachers don’t use a variety of tasks all focused on the same goal, students don’t extract the underlying principles of the concept. This means they have difficulty differentiating the key ideas.
- Performing big tasks in isolation means that students don’t center the content into a larger historical or conceptual network.
- Students with special education needs often require more practice, or alternative approaches to content—this is not learning styles, but a diagnosed physiological difference such as a visual impairment, an attention deficit disorder, etc.
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Courtney Ostaff 