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Discovery learning
Discovery learning is a powerful instructional approach that guides and motivates learners to explore information and concepts in order to construct new ideas, identify new relationships and create new models of thinking and behavior.
By using the discovery learning, it incorporate three key ideas:
• Problem Solving: They guide and motivate learners to find solutions by pulling together information and generalizing knowledge.
• Learner Management: They allow participants, working alone or in small teams, to learn in their own ways and at their own pace.
• Integrating and Connecting: They encourage integration of new knowledge into the learner's existing knowledge base and clearly connect to the real world.
Discovery Learning provides students with opportunities to develop hypotheses to answer questions and can contribute to the development of a lifelong love of learning. Students propose issues or problems, gather data and observations to develop hypotheses, confirm or refine their hypotheses, and explain or prove their problems
Advantages
The discovery learning literature often claims the following advantages:
 Supports active engagement of the learner in the learning process
 Fosters curiosity
 Enables the development of life long learning skills
 Personalizes the learning experience
 Highly motivating as it allows individuals the opportunity to experiment and discover something for themselves
 Builds on learner's prior knowledge and understanding
 Develops a sense of independence and autonomy
 Make them responsible for their own mistakes and results
 Learning as most adults learn on the job and in real life situations
 A reason to record their procedure and discoveries - such as not repeating mistakes, a way to analyze what happened, and a way to record a victorious discovery
 Develops problem solving and creative skills
 Finds new and interesting avenues of information and learning - such as gravy made with too much cornstarch can become a molding medium
These sorts of arguments can be regrouped in two broad categories
 Development of meta cognitive skills (including some higher level cognitive strategies) useful in lifelong learning.
 Motivation
Disadvantages
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 (Sometimes huge) cognitive overload, potential to confuse the learner if no initial framework is available, etc.
 Measurable performance (compared to hard-core instructional designs) is worse for most learning situations.
 Creations of misconceptions ("knowing less after instruction")
 Weak students have a tendency to "fly under the radar" (Aleven et al. 2003) and teacher's fail to detect situations needing strong remediation or scaffolding.
 Some studies admit that strong students can benefit from weak treatments and others conclude that there is no difference, but more importantly they also conclude that weak students benefit strongly from strong treatments.
Advantages and disadvantages -http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Discovery_learning