Taught Helplessness

I’m currently reading “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman and it’s interesting to think about what the theory of product design has to say about instructional design.

For example, the author discusses how “learned helplessness” can result from poor design. A product whose functionality isn’t discoverable, and that doesn’t provide good feedback, will be frustrating to use, so users will likely give up after trying and failing a few times.

Just as I was making the connection to teaching math in my mind, the author himself brought up math instruction as a common example of “taught helplessness”: When math is presented as unintuitive, and poor or misguided feedback is given, students are likely to just give up. The problem is amplified by the linear way in math is usually taught. In many classrooms, if you don’t understand what happened yesterday, you will probably struggle to understand what is happening today.

Originally posted on Mastodon.