Contingent teaching works best

Three year old children are normally considered to be too young to learn how to build pyramids out of bricks - when a parent or teacher talks to a child about how to do this or does it themselves in the hope the child will copy, little progress is made.

Professor David Wood at the Centre for Research in Development, Instruction and Training at Nottingham University has used a computer to teach children how to do it, and claims that his 'contingent' teaching method 'massively' out-performs other approaches.

The computer system makes suggestions such as 'get the four biggest pieces first'. When a child makes a mistake, it goes back a stage. Professor Wood says teachers rarely do it right: 'Typically they either talk too much, fail to observe or listen carefully to the learner, offer too little assistance or maintain instruction at the same level when a learner faces difficulty.

'The best approach is to teach contingently, which means adjusting the help given to the child's level. If a child gets into trouble, extra help is given; if the child is succeeding, less help is given.'

The principles are to be used to create a new generation of computer tutoring systems, able to teach algebra to 12-year-olds and arithmetic to seven and eight-year-olds.