Explicit guidance and feedback from teachers is more effective in teaching students new content and skills than letting them discover these for themselves.
This is a premise of cognitive load theory, which is based on our knowledge of evolutionary psychology and human cognition, including short- and long-term memory.
I started working on cognitive load theory in the early 1980s. Since then, “ownership” of the theory shifted to my research group at UNSW and then to a large group of international researchers.
