The Goal-Free Effect

And Its Limitations

From A Little Guide for Teachers: Cognitive Load Theory, by Greg Ashman.

The main difficulty I have found in making use of the Goal-Free Effect when teaching is that it only works for a limited class of problems. A problem must be expansive enough for students to explore on their own with their current level of knowledge but constrained enough that by finding out what they can, they are likely to arrive at the unstated goal. Although this works well for simple geometry problems, I have found that other classes of mathematics problems do not work as well. For instance, a problem I created involved a mathematical model of the depth of water in a tidal harbour. Students did not manage to find out the features that I had intended and so I resorted to prompting and, eventually, modeling the answer myself.