Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Researchers have debated whether instructional-based teach-ing or exploration-based active learning is better for decadeswith unsatisfying results. A main obstacle is the difficulty inprecisely controlling and characterizing the pedagogical meth-ods used and the learning conditions in empirical studies. Toaddress this, we leveraged existing computational models ofteaching and active learning to formalize the methods and thelearning process. We compared the two pedagogical methodsin a concept-learning framework and investigated their effec-tiveness under various scenarios. Our results show that whenthe learner and teacher are conceptually aligned, teaching isat least as effective as, and often much more effective than ac-tive learning, but when the alignment is broken, active learningcan yield moderate improvement over teaching. We concludeby discussing our results’ implications for the debate and theprospects of bringing computational models to bear on com-plex real-world problems that are resistant to simple experi-mental investigation.