Activities that promote student invention can appear inefficient, because students do
not generate canonical solutions, and therefore the students may perform badly on
standard assessments. Two studies on teaching descriptive statistics to 9th-grade students
examined whether invention activities may prepare students to learn. Study 1
found that invention activities, when coupled with subsequent learning resources like
lectures, led to strong gains in procedural skills, insight into formulas, and abilities to
evaluate data from an argument. Additionally, an embedded assessment experiment
crossed the factors of instructional method by type of transfer test, with 1 test including
resources for learning and 1 not. A “tell-and-practice” instructional condition led
to the same transfer results as an invention condition when there was no learning resource,
but the invention condition did better than the tell-and-practice condition
when there was a learning resource. This demonstrates the value of invention activities
for future learning from resources, and the value of assessments that include opportunities
to learn during a test. In Study 2, classroom teachers implemented the instruction
and replicated the results. The studies demonstrate that intuitively
compelling student-centered activities can be both pedagogically tractable and effective
at preparing students to learn.