Inventing to Prepare for Future Learning: The Hidden Efficiency of Encouraging Original Student Production in Statistics Instruction

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 stu-dents 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 includ-ing resources for learning and 1…