3 High Structure
As the old warning says: Here there be monsters. Specifically, monsters of the absence of solid evidence.
Structure, broadly, is the amount and detail of guidance given to learners before, during, and after learning. Assignments can be low or high structure, as they increase or decrease the amount of guidance given to students. Often, high structure assignments are shorter in duration, or are made up of short-duration parts, and more specific in instructions.
Fascinatingly (and unfortunately for ease of assignment description), structure changes as students change – because what is low structure in one context, may be high structure in another. For example, a kindergarten math problem needs to provide levels of structure on addition that would be mind-numbingly over-structured for a high school student. Being presented with a college students’ math problem would likely be completely ‘unstructured’ for a junior high student. Decreased need for structure is evidence of learning. (Note: If anyone wants to help translate these into non-US school grades, please do comment in Hypothesis! I’ll give attribution)
Examples should help to illustrate:
Examples of Low-Structure College Assignments
- A mechanical engineering course where students are given requirements for designing a fountain at the start of the course, and work in groups to create mockup designs for the fountain throughout the semester.
- A term paper, due at the end of the course, without structuring throughout the course to give feedback on the parts of the paper.
- A ten-minute end of course presentation on a topic of the students’ choosing.
- Learners in a environmental science course editing or adding to wikipedia pages about environmental sciences.
Examples of High-Structure College Assignments
- A practice quiz with multiple-choice questions.
- Exercises where students apply a concept directly to an example problem.
- Learners contributing question prompts, answers, and distractor choices to an open test question bank, with examples, and feedback from the teacher on their first few prompts and distractors.
- A peer review assignment with a detailed rubric.
Evidence-wise, a fair bit of theory indicates that high structure usually serves more students better than low-structure. The empirical evidence (for either high or low structure) is thin on the ground, but increased structure contributing to greater learning is key to several important and well-researched bodies of theory, particularly extraneous cognition (Mayer, 2017) scaffolding (Doo et al., 2020; Ninio & Bruner, 1978) and Kirschner et al.’s (2006) criticisms of the lack of evidence for results of lower structure active learning.
A parallel: In Grasp, Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto outline the various positives and negatives of what they describe as ‘inside out’ and ‘outside in’ learning. Roughly, in their description, ‘inside out’ learning attempts to build learning from an understanding of the functions of the brain. ‘Outside in’ learning attempts to build learning from a desired outcome in the world. Often, ‘outside in’ learning methods, like discovery learning, designs like project based learning with big multi-semester projects, can engage a few (often already well-prepared) students very well, but leave a number of students out – because they’re missing necessary structure. Low-structure learning runs the risk of leaving students out.
At this time, I am not aware of any empirical studies directly comparing the success of students in low-structure environments directly with success in high-structure environments. Furthermore, the effectiveness of structure may vary across subject matter, or other factors. Please, if you have good experimental studies comparing low and high structure learning, comment them in hypothes.is – I will add them with attribution to you.