Abstract
In educational practice, learners are generally novices in a field, whereas instructors are experts. Experts usually prefer, and benefit from, inquiry-based activities. Do instructors tend to believe (perhaps unconsciously) that learners share this preference and therefore that they would benefit more from engagement in inquiry-based activities than from other forms of explicit teaching, such as worked examples? Such a belief is referred to in the present article as “instructors’ inquiry-expecting bias”. This concept is an integration of the existing concepts of the expertise reversal effect and the curse of knowledge. To examine the hypothesis, 2 role-judgment experiments were conducted. In this original method, university students played the role of learner or instructor. In Study 1, the participants (N=255) completed a questionnaire that described various teaching or learning methods and asked them to judge the desirability of those methods. Study 2 (N=184) involved a specific problem-solving situation. The results indicated that those who played the role of instructor exhibited the hypothesized bias, both as a general trend in Study 1, and also in the specific problem-solving situation in Study 2. The discussion describes some suggestions for educational practice, based on these results.
