Exploratory learning before instruction: Comparing individual exploration, collaborative exploration, and preparation for future collaboration.

Instructors often prioritize traditional instruction in the classroom, despite evidence supporting the use of active learning methods. Exploratory learning, presenting novel problems to students before presenting information about the procedure and underlying concepts, can improve students’ conceptual understanding of instructional material. In exploratory learning, collaborative learning is often an important component of the instructional design. However, few researchers have directly compared collaborative and individual exploration to determine if there are benefits of adding collaboration to exploration. By disentangling exploratory and collaborative learning, we can learn how and why collaborative exploration fails or succeeds. One idea is that adding individual preparation before peer collaboration (PFC), followed by direct instruction, might offer learning benefits beyond each instructional method alone. The current experiments directly compared individual exploration, collaborative exploration, and PFC. Experiment 1 (N = 177) and Experiment 2 (N = 196) compared three exploratory learning conditions: collaborative, PFC, and individual conditions. In Experiment 1, students in collaborative conditions reported higher situational interest, curiosity, self-efficacy, active engagement, and interactive engagement, and the PFC condition reported higher self-efficacy, active, and interactive engagement compared to the individual condition, but the findings were not replicated in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, students in the individual condition had higher conceptual knowledge scores compared to the collaborative and PFC conditions. Students in the PFC condition had higher conceptual transfer scores than those in the individual condition, which could be explained by constructive and interactive engagement. There were no significant differences in procedural knowledge and procedural transfer across conditions. When choosing which exploratory learning instructional design to use, practitioners should consider the type of knowledge to target. Overall, individual exploration might better suit conceptual knowledge, and PFC might be better for conceptual transfer.