P. Kirschner's stacking up good observations
Why would one want to read what some grumpy old psychologist writes?
Over on his eponymous ‘stack, Paul Kirschner has been providing informative and witty posts since about the beginning of 2025. I encourage you folks to read them. I especially encourage Dear Readers who are interested in instruction—what we sometimes call “teaching” in these parts—to read the posts.
Professor Kirschner—he retired from academia after 20-30 years at the Open University of the Netherlands—has written extensively about educational psychology, starting with work on science education, distance education, and technology in education (to mention a few areas) in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the early 2000s, his work on instruction has been very influential, particularly with people who discuss “the science of this” or “the science of that.” In particular, his papers on cognitive load have been very widely cited. I’ve added references to a couple of them at the end of this note.
The mostly widely known paper, however, is one from 2006 about instruction in general. In “Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching,” Professor Kirschner and his colleagues John Sweller and Richard Clark recount the reasons that they do not advocate the popular methods that are usually contrasted with systematic, explicit, structured instruction. It’s worth a read (and it’s readable) and, in his post for 13 July 2025 (“My Sunday Morning Peeve”), Professor Kirschner embedded an image of the first page of that article.
So, scoot on over to Paul Kirschner and get some education!
Some articles
Clark, R. E., Kirschner, P. A., & Sweller, J. (2012). Putting students on the path to learning: The case for fully guided instruction. American Educator, 36(1), 6-11. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ971752.pdf
Kirschner, P. A. (2002). Cognitive load theory: Implications of cognitive load theory on the design of learning. Learning and Instruction, 12(1), 1-10. https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/16884/kirschner_02_cognitive_load_theory_implications_cognitive.pdf
Kirschner, P. A. (2017). Stop propagating the learning styles myth. Computers & Education, 106, 166-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2016.12.006
Kirschner , P. A. , Sweller , J. and Clark , R. 2006 . Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41, 75-86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1
Van Merriënboer, J. J., Kirschner, P. A., & Kester, L. (2003). Taking the load off a learner's mind: Instructional design for complex learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 5-13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_2