The IKEA effect

Yet another reason to doubt the effectiveness of inquiry learning

Photo by cestsibon on Unsplash

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Unlike education research, in the field of educational psychology, the case against pure discovery learning was accepted long ago. Instead, the argument now tends to centre around whether there should be a period of exploration and discovery prior to explicit teaching — sometimes known as ‘productive failure’ — or whether we should explicitly teach concepts and procedures from the outset.

This argument is best litigated in Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure, which is now available online as a pdf as Twitter user @anon_4u recently pointed out. It is also the reason why I decided to investigate the concept of productive failure for my PhD research. As you may recall, I found that explicit teaching beat productive failure for middle school children learning how to calculate energy efficiency.

Since my paper was published in 2020, I have been alerted when other papers cite it. One of these is a recent open-access article in Instructional Science by Inga Glogger-Frey, Anne-Katrin Treier and Alexander Renkl which replicated my finding — explicit instruction beats productive failure. The Glogger-Frey et al. paper also introduced me to a new concept — the IKEA effect.