Guiding secondary school students during task selection

Secondary school students often learn new cognitive skills by practicing with tasks that vary in difficulty, amount of support and/or content. Occasionally, they have to select these tasks themselves. Studies on task-selection guidance investigated either procedural guidance (specific rules for selecting tasks) or strategic guidance (general rules and explanations for task selection), but never directly compared them. Experiment 1 aimed to replicate these studies by comparing procedural guidance and strategic guidance to a no-guidance condition, in an electronic learning environment in which participants practiced eight self-selected tasks. Results showed no differences in selected tasks during practice and domain-specific skill acquisition between the experimental groups. A possible explanation for this is an ineffective combination of feedback and feed forward (i.e. the task-selection advice). The second experiment compared inferential guidance (which combines procedural feedback with strategic feed forward), to a no-guidance condition. Results showed that participants selected more difficult, less-supported tasks after receiving inferential guidance than after no guidance. Differences in domain-specific skill acquisition were not significant, but higher conformity to inferential guidance did significantly predict higher domain-specific skill acquisition. Hence, we conclude that inferential guidance can positively affect task selections and domain-specific skill acquisition, but only when conformity is high.