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Edutopia
The Difference Between Productive Struggle and Spinning Your Wheels
Identifying when students are repeating problems but not actually
progressing towards mastery can help educators refine their instruction.
By Laura Lee
March 12, 2020
Teaching students to persevere when facing a challenge is important,
writes former middle school math and science teacher Neil Heffernan,
but it is also crucial to know how to distinguish between productive
persistence and wheel-spinning, a state where students repeat an
attempt at a skill without ever reaching mastery. It’s a fine line.
In EdSurge’s “Persistence Is Not Always Productive: How to Stop
Students From Spinning Their Wheels,” Heffernan, now a computer science
professor, says if a student does not understand a concept but
continues to focus on it, valuable time is squandered. “You don’t need
to give students too many of the same type of problem—chances are,
they’ll either get it in the first few or they won’t, in which case
adding more is just a waste of time,” he writes.
Not only can continuing to pursue a problem waste time and effort, but
it can actually be harmful, Heffernan argues. “We may make the same
mistake over and over again until it becomes a habit. And students who
continually find their efforts don’t lead to improvements may become
less likely to persist over time.”
What should an educator do? First, identify when your students are
spinning their wheels. If a student is repeating a problem, ask if they
are grasping the concept or is this wheel-spinning.
In a study of more than 123,000 homework assignments, researchers
defined mastery “as correctly completing three problems in a row," and
wheel-spinning as "failing to gain mastery even after trying on 10
different problems (and getting feedback on each one).” Once a teacher
determines that a student is wheel-spinning on a particular concept,
they can offer additional instruction or, if the entire class is
struggling, reteach a topic.
Heffernan’s team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute developed a free
tool for math teachers to detect wheel-spinning. ASSISTments, gives
students and teachers feedback on assignments and data about where
students are spinning their wheels. They can use the feedback to modify
instruction or focus on a specific objective.
Letting kids try things several times makes sense—and encouraging them
to persist can be productive—but only if you can determine whether they
are actually making progress on solving the problem. “The goal is not
to remove the obstacles from learning,” Heffernan writes. “Rather, we
want to make sure the right kinds of obstacles are in place—neither
obstacles that discourage learning because they wrongly presume the
child has already absorbed preliminary concepts, nor obstacles that
pose no challenge.”
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