Tasks with Tipcards - Step by Step (2/5)
Incremental worked examples
What makes a Task a good Task
When designing a learning task, the primary focus has to be on embedding it in the actual course of leraning. Learning tasks and, in particular, tasks with graded aids, can only be effective if they are closely related to available prior knowledge or previous teaching. Good embedding also means to ask whether a powerful learner will be able to solve the problem in the presented formulation without additional information, especially without the hints provided.
Also a recognizable "form" of a task plays an important role: if the students are to work independently and without any questions towards the teacher, they must be able to recognize from the outset of which kind the solution might be. Practically, this means that the actual task must be formulated in mainly ONE sentence which already suggests the form of the answer.
Living-world contexts can contribute significantly to a positive learning effect. In the case of clearly domain-inherent questions, however, it makes little sense to try to postion the task into a framework context. In such cases the phenomenon in question can be presented in other ways - descriptive or visual. Such a presentation can serve as a (visual) anchor instead of a contextstory, which additionally promotes work at the problem to be solved.
In order to vary the level of difficulty or complexity the text of the task can refer to recent lesson contents. Depending on how far these hints might reach, the following tips and informations must be adapted accordingly.
As mentioned before problems suitable for this format should suggest only one possible solution. With the system of aids proposed here, only a linear sequence of processing steps can be represented. What fits very well is planning an experiment, the evaluation of an experiment, the interpretation of a discovery and similar.
This constraint conditionally limits the applicability of this format. On the other hand this applies to more or less all methodological approaches.
