onesexamples

Onesexamples is a term used in educational theory and instructional design to describe a practice of presenting a minimal set of examples—often a single, carefully chosen instance per concept—to illustrate core ideas before introducing variations. The name is a compound of "one" and "examples," highlighting conciseness and singular representation.

In practice, onesexamples refers to curated collections of problems, sentences, or code snippets that embody the defining feature of a topic with one representative case. It is used across disciplines, including mathematics, linguistics, computer science, and language teaching, where a well-chosen example can illuminate a rule or property.

Examples of application include a math text presenting one canonical example of a proof technique for a given theorem, a linguistics course showing one exemplary sentence that demonstrates a syntactic rule, or a programming tutorial providing one input that triggers a common edge case.

Proponents argue that one strong example can reduce cognitive load, accelerate initial understanding, and serve as a stable anchor for learners as they encounter more diverse cases. Critics note that relying on a single example may obscure variability, bias which instances are considered canonical, and hinder transfer to atypical cases.

Historically, the concept aligns with minimalist and exemplar-based approaches in education and has appeared in pedagogy discussions and open educational resource design since the early 21st century.

See also: minimal pair, exemplar-based learning, one-shot learning, single-example datasets.