Correct Answers But No Learning

Learning doesn't always happen when the student completes a task. It's what happens when the task causes the student to think.

This morning I played with my daughter on a phonics puzzle designed to develop her reading skills. The task seemed straightforward enough; match word cards to pictures by blending sounds together. She zipped through it fairly easily but from an instructional design perspective, I could see a fatal flaw in the exercise. When I asked her how she was doing so well in making the words and to talk me through her strategy, she said: "You just match the colours, Dad."

This is a textbook example of poor instructional design. The surface features of the task (colour-matching) are more salient than the underlying cognitive goal (phoneme blending). She completed the task correctly, but without actually practising the skill it was supposed to develop. In cognitive terms, she succeeded through perceptual cues rather than conceptual understanding.

Me and my daughter playing a phonics matching puzzle

Engaged but Unchanged

Now don’t get me wrong. There is inherent value in simply doing this kind of activity with my daughter. She has learning difficulties, so I’m always looking for ways to connect, encourage, and build confidence. That matters. But this activity highlights a core misconception in instructional design. If the aim is to develop a specific cognitive skill, like phonemic awareness or decoding, then the task must actually require the child to engage in that thinking.

To learn the thing, you must think about the thing.

This is the problem with many well-meaning educational activities: they allow children to appear competent without developing the underlying knowledge or skill. The result is a kind of cognitive mirage; success without substance. When tasks contain superficial cues that are more rewarding than the underlying cognitive processes they're meant to develop, learners will invariably take the path of least resistance.

If learning is a change in long-term memory as Paul Kirschner has argued, then these surface-level victories leave the kind of memory that will make her a better reader, essentially untouched. Completing a phonics puzzle by matching colours has acquired no new knowledge about letter-sound relationships, no strengthened neural pathways for decoding, no building blocks for future reading success. The cognitive architecture remains largely unchanged.

The Illusion of Competence

What makes this dynamic particularly deceptive is how satisfying these surface-level victories feel. My daughter experienced what Robert Bjork call “illusions of comprehension and competence": the misleading sense that she had mastered the skill when she had merely found a workaround. The task felt successful because it was easy and yielded correct answers, but it produced no meaningful learning.

The child develops what we might call "performance confidence", in other words, faith in their ability to succeed at tasks without developing actual competence in the underlying skill. This false confidence becomes particularly problematic when it leads students to avoid genuinely challenging work. Why struggle with difficult problems when you've found reliable shortcuts to success?

This is why we should be deeply sceptical of "engagement" as a metric for educational effectiveness. A child who is busily occupied, enthusiastically participating, and producing correct responses may be learning nothing of value. Worse still, they may be reinforcing shallow approaches to learning that will prove counterproductive when the scaffolding is removed and they need to learn independently.

Surface versus Deep Thinking

The distinction between my daughter's colour-matching strategy and genuine phonemic awareness reflects a fundamental principle in cognitive psychology: the difference between surface-level and deep-level processing. This insight has roots in decades of research, from Craik and Lockhart's pioneering work on levels of processing in the 1970s to Chi and Glaser's studies of expert-novice differences in the 1980s.

Craik and Lockhart demonstrated that information processed at a "shallow" level such as focusing on perceptual features like visual appearance or sound, creates weaker, more fragile memories than information processed at a "deep" level, where meaning and connections are emphasised. In my daughter's case, she was processing the puzzle at the shallowest possible level: pure visual pattern matching. No semantic processing, no phonological awareness, no meaningful encoding that would support later retrieval or transfer.

Chi and Glaser's research revealed an even more troubling implication. When they studied how physics students approached problems, they found that novices consistently focused on surface features such as the presence of inclined planes, springs, or pulleys while experts immediately perceived the deeper structural relationships involving energy, momentum, and force. Crucially, this wasn't just about knowledge; it was about what students had learned to pay attention to.

Teaching the Wrong Thing Really Well

This phonics puzzle wasn’t just poorly designed, it was perversely effective at teaching exactly the opposite thing it claimed to. She quickly became proficient at visual pattern matching, developing a fluent and confident approach that worked reliably within the constraints of that particular task. In other words, the activity succeeded brilliantly at reinforcing a cognitive strategy that would prove useless in real reading situations. This represents perhaps the most insidious form of educational failure: when tasks don't simply fail to teach the intended skill, but actively cultivate counterproductive habits of mind.

When students repeatedly encounter activities that reward surface-level thinking, they don't just miss opportunities to develop deeper understanding, they become increasingly skilled at avoiding it. The child who learns to solve math problems by identifying visual cues rather than understanding mathematical relationships, the student who writes essays by following templates rather than developing arguments, or the pupil who learns about ecosystems through fun activities but only remembers the craft projects, are all receiving highly effective instruction in the art of intellectual shortcuts. They're developing what we might call "expertise in superficiality": sophisticated strategies for succeeding at tasks while bypassing the cognitive work those tasks were meant to promote.

Learning doesn't always happen when the student completes a task. It's what happens when the task causes the student to think. Instructional design is not neutral, it always teaches something. The only question is whether it's teaching the right thing.