18 - Learner Control Principle 2: Make Important Instructional Events the Default

Brief Definition

In an environment similar to that for Learner Control Principle 1, learners who have more control of their e-learning experience will benefit more when practice problems and even extra practice problems are set to appear as a default as the learner navigates the course options. Applying Learner Control Principle 2 better ensures that users will proceed through the examples and practice problems, and therefore, will perform better on content assessment (Clark and Mayer, 2011).

An Artifact

GCFLearnFree.org’s tutorial “Introduction to Division” does an excellent job guiding the user through examples (including some with real-life application) and then practice problems. This snippet shown below is the 5th set of practice problems (scaffolded where the first set just applies the very early stages of division) in this short tutorial. Notice the mechanism the practice use for feedback: red box and shaded for wrong answer; happy orange 12 for right answer. At the very bottom of the screen is an opportunity for even more practice with an optional “assessment.” This tutorial could have been spot on with Learner Control Principle 2 had they simply left out the idea that the assessment is optional and offered it as the next step after this last set of practice problems.

References

Clark, R. C., & Mayer, R. E. (2011). E-learning and the science of instruction: Proven guidelines for consumers and designers of multimedia learning. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.