Challenge
The extent to which open literacy tasks provide appropriate levels of difficulty to make learning experiences rewarding and successful.
- “The most motivated students [are] those who [are] engaged in moderately challenging tasks that [lead] them to make new discoveries and to recognize their understandings.” (Turner & Paris, 1995, p. 666)
- “Moderately challenging tasks lead to positive feelings because they provide feedback to students about what they are learning and how they are progressing. If a task is too easy, students become bored. If they are too difficult, students are likely to become frustrated.” (ibid.)
- “…provide enough flexibility so that students can tackle a problem and use their competencies to solve it.” (ibid.)
- “…allow all students to work at their fullest capacity by adjusting the goals and relative difficulty of the tasks.” (ibid.)
- In Turner and Paris’s study, “the classrooms that successfully promoted challenge” had teachers who “designed tasks that required reflection and planning and that could not be accomplished in a rote or automatic fashion…they could be accomplished in a variety of ways.” (ibid.)
- “Challenging tasks [tend] to pull learning in a variety of ways. They prompted children to use more organization and self-monitoring strategies, such as arranging the pieces of a game ahead of time; to use more and varied readings strategies, such as using title, picture, and sound-symbol cues simultaneously; and to persist longer at an activity.” (ibid.)
Reference:
Turner, J., & Paris, S. (1995). How literacy tasks influence children's motivation for literacy.The Reading Teacher,48(8), 662-673.
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