- Today there's an emphasis to teach complex, higher order skills and research shows that students learn such skills better through active learning approaches. - However, research is still unclear on what types of active learning is best suited. - Active learning has a lot of different features and some types of categorisation have divided them by degree of scaffolding, or the amount of constructivism. - This study looks at specific features of a particular type of active learning (namely simulations) and looked at how changing those features would affect the learning. - Constraint. The amount of student choice in the students' exploration. High constraint would be a multiple choice question. Low constraint would be building models in an open environment. - Feedback. This itself is complex and can be broken down as task vs progress, delayed vs immediate, guidance or correct answer etc. - Instructor Effort. While this may not directly impact learning, the effort for an instructor does play a role whether that activity is chosen or not. - The debate on effective feedback is still unanswered across dimensions. For example the effects of elaborate feedback vs simply providing the correct answer has produced mixed results. - Timely feedback often leads to more effective and efficient learning but can also be used by students as a crutch or to game the system by relying too much on feedback rather than thinking through the question themselves - Some studies do report that immediate, elaborate feedback that includes information on what to do next is highly effective. - Many activities seem to fall in the bucket of high constraint with immediate feedback or low constraint with delayed feedback. There seems to be an inherent tension between constraint and feedback. - One of the most fundamental skill for students in all science classes is designing a good experiment. The paper conducts an experiment to test how different activities build this skill in particular. - Based on the experiments the paper concluded that differences in feedback lead to differences in student learning, but differences in constraint did not lead to any significant differences. - This is supported by student performances improving in areas where feedback was provided and not improving when students were not provided feedback and no improvements in areas where feedback was not provided. - There are arguments in favour of both heavily constraining and limiting constraints, but this experiment showed no differences in learning in both the approaches. --- Meir, Eli, et al. "Designing Activities to Teach Higher-Order Skills: How Feedback and Constraint Affect Learning of Experimental Design." _CBE—Life Sciences Education_ 23.1 (2024): ar1.