From time to time one of the teachers I know will propose running a course with no deadlines. It takes some effort to arrange a course to allow that level of flexibility, and in general giving students flexibility seems like a good thing to do; and yet in every case I’ve observed thus far, such a course always goes poorly. Why?
We all must make frequent decisions about what to do next, and these decisions are rarely simple: there are more things to do than we can do and such a variety of reasons to pick one over another than comparisons between them are challenging. Managing our focus and time is hard, requiring cognitive effort to do it well.
There are many reasons a student might choose to spend time learning one topic or another, but three are common and worth contrasting.
An urgent task is one that must be done soon or not at all: if a deadline is missed, the opportunity to do it will disappear. Urgent tasks have a strong emotional impact11 This is one reason that a sense of urgency is used in many scams and cons. and are relatively easy to chose over less urgent tasks.
An important task is one that matters or achieves something desired: if only one of a set of tasks can be accomplished, completing the most important will have the most desirable result. Important tasks have strong emotional reward when completed, but relatively low emotional motivation before then: so much of our lives are filled with less-important tasks that there is little cognitive dissonance in choosing them over more-important tasks.
A requisite task is one that is chosen not because of its own importance or urgency but because it will enable some future task or help prevent some future ill. Requisite tasks inherit some of the emotion of what they enable, but are reduced strength.
Most tasks involved in learning have the weakest of these forms of motivation, being distant requisites for something important. When a student is set a problem to solve or essay to write, not only is that task itself unimportant but the skills it is helping build are also unimportant: it will take hundreds of such exercises to build the important competencies that motivate them.
Some students are able to self-motivate despite this, perhaps from curiosity or determination or enjoyment of learning, but many lack that self-motivation22 It is interesting to consider why so many students lack self-motivation to learn. Virtually every small child is limitlessly curious and loves to learn, but relatively few retain that through to adulthood. Multiple small-scale educational methodologies strive to retain that self-motivation, with evidence both for and against their success. I believe such efforts have merit, but am far from an expert in those methods so I say no more about them in this post.. The easiest and most broadly effective motivation help for such students is teacher-introduced urgency: an artificial reward (grade, marks, or credit) coupled with an artificial deadline. A course without that urgency, or with the deadlines too widely spaced, reduces many students’ motivation to complete the learning tasks of the course, with predictably negative impacts on their final performance.
Many concepts are too complicated to fit in an unprepared mind. To learn these concepts, first a student must learn a variety of smaller building blocks, and learn them well enough that they can be used without mental effort so that when they are used to teach a later concept they do not themselves burden the mind of the student.
A significant role of a teacher is to pick a set of these smaller concepts and order them to be learned one after another. In theory this role is not necessary: each learner could start with the goal, then look up each element used to explain it, and so on working backwards until something learnable is reached, and then work forward again to master the goal. Having done both ways of learning (teacher guided and self exploration) I can attest that having a teacher order topics for me significantly reduces my effort and increases the pace of my learning.
It should be noted that there is not a single correct order of topics. I have had many experiences re-ordering the topics in a course or even an entire college degree without significantly impacting the difficulty of attaining the end result. The task is not to identify the prerequisite sequence, but rather to identify one sequence that can achieve the goal.
A teacher’s job does not stop with identifying how to reach the large goal, because it is hard for students in the midst of learning to know if they have learned one piece well enough to move on or not. Although learning assessments are often used to create urgency and produce grades, they also have value in helping students finish internalizing one piece before moving on to the next. Without such assessment- and deadline-guided sequencing, students may skip or skimp on requisite but less-interesting earlier pieces, leaving them unprepared to learn important later pieces.