Knowledge is power

I'll have to come back to this later, but this is a "well, DUH!!" kind of education article, that at the same time flies in the face of every thing that teachers are taught about how to teach: 

When Knowledge Is Unforgettable  Adults remember more of what they learned in school than they think they do—thanks to an aspect of education that doesn’t get much attention in policy debates. 

Researchers have long known that going to school boosts IQ. The question is whether it makes people smarter by building mental horsepower, by adding to students’ database of knowledge and skills, or some of each component. Recent research published in Psychology and Aging shows that people who stay in school for a longer part of their lives are no faster at simple mental judgements (like line comparison) than their less-schooled counterparts. Other research published in Psychological Science shows that high-performing schools do little to boost kids’ mental horsepower. Instead, schooling makes students smarter largely by increasing what they know, both factual knowledge and specific mental skills like analyzing historical documents and learning procedures in mathematics.

In other words, education must be knowledge-focused--just like E.D. Hirsh has been telling everyone for decades now. Simultaneously, education schools have been downplaying the same need for knowledge because 1) they think learning science, history, spelling, etc. bores kids, and boredom is the greatest evil in schools to be rooted out and stomped on wherever it is found, and 2) kids don't need knowledge when they have Google!

Discover Project Follow Through

[ Times Colonist ] Many Canadian provinces adopted discovery-based curriculums about 15 years ago. Newer curricula and textbooks appeared, advocating the use of multiple strategies in the classroom, replacing more conventional methods for teaching arithmetic. The result of this phenomenon has led to a remarkable decline in math skills, and a proliferation of children enrolled in costly learning centres to achieve knowledge of foundational math facts.

These centres and private tutors use more conventional and traditional methods to teach their students, because they have been proven to work. This is something to which our policy-makers must pay attention.

Gee, it didn't work! Project Follow Through came out in the early 1970's--that's fully 40 years ago, which means pretty much every single teacher currently trained and working has been trained after its findings were known...and utterly ignored.

The world has known what works and what doesn't in math education for four decades. Educrats continue to ignore it.

Making kids feel stupid

My new favorite education quote:

“You know what’s the worst kind of instruction? The kind of instruction that makes kids feel stupid. And that’s what a lot of that discovery stuff does; their working memory gets overloaded, they’re confused. That’s bad instruction,” said Anna Stokke, an associate professor in the University of Winnipeg’s department of mathematics and statistics, who wrote the C.D. Howe Institute report. [ Decline of Canadian students’ math skills the fault of ‘discovery learning’: C.D. Howe Institute ]

Construct this!

A nice overview journal article detailing how little scientific basis is behind constructivist educational techniques, and how much is behind direct instruction. It also talks about how project-based learning techniques overtax working memory and can work against creating long-term memories:

Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching

The past half-century of empirical research on this issue has provided overwhelming and unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance specifically designed to support the cognitive processing necessary for learning.

...

Working memory has two well-known characteristics: When processing novel information, it is very limited in duration and in capacity. We have known at least since Peterson and Peterson (1959) that almost all information stored in working memory and not rehearsed is lost within 30 sec and have known at least since Miller (1956) that the capacity of working memory is limited to only a very small number of elements. That number is about seven according to Miller, but may be as low as four, plus or minus one (see, e.g., Cowan, 2001). Furthermore, when processing rather than merely storing information, it may be reasonable to conjecture that the number of items that can be processed may only be two or three, depending on the nature of the processing required.

...

Furthermore, that working memory load does not contribute to the accumulation of knowledge in long-term memory because while working memory is being used to search for problem solutions, it is not available and cannot be used to learn. Indeed, it is possible to search for extended periods of time with quite minimal alterations to long-term memory.

...

None of the preceding arguments and theorizing would be important if there was a clear body of research using controlled experiments indicating that unguided or minimally guided instruction was more effective than guided instruction. In fact, precisely as one might expect from our knowledge of human cognition and the distinctions between learning and practicing a discipline, the reverse is true. Controlled experiments almost uniformly indicate that when dealing with novel information, learners should be explicitly shown what to do and how to do it. 

...

Problem-solving search is an inefficient way of altering long-term memory because its function is to find a problem solution, not alter long-term memory. Indeed, problem-solving search can function perfectly with no learning whatsoever (Sweller, 1988). Thus, problem-solving search overburdens limited working memory and requires working memory resources to be used for activities that are unrelated to learning. As a consequence, learners can engage in problem-solving activities for extended periods and learn almost nothing

 

Sage on the Stage

I have so many tabs open on three different computers, that I need to put in a serious effort to clear them. Here's a start...

Sage on the Stage: Is lecturing really all that bad? By Guido Schwerdt and Amelie C. Wuppermann

Ever since John Dewey explored hands-on learning at the University of Chicago Laboratory School more than a century ago, lecture-style presentations have been criticized as old-fashioned and ineffective.

[...]

Alternative instructional practices based on active and problem-oriented learning presumably do not suffer from these disadvantages. But they may have their own shortcomings. Learning by problem-solving may be less efficient, as discovery and problem-solving often take more time than mastering information received from an authority figure. And incorrect or misleading information may be conveyed in conversations among students in middle schools.

[...]

In our study, we examine whether student achievement in the United States is affected by the share of teaching time devoted to lecture-style presentations as distinct from problem-solving activities. Employing information on in-class time use provided by a nationally representative sample of U.S. teachers in the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we estimate the impact of teaching practices on student achievement by looking at the differential effects on the same student of two different teachers, using two different teaching strategies. We find that teaching style matters for student achievement, but in the opposite direction than anticipated by conventional wisdom: an emphasis on lecture-style presentations (rather than problem-solving activities) is associated with an increase—not a decrease—in student achievement. This result implies that a shift to problem-solving instruction is more likely to adversely affect student learning than to improve it.

[...]

Contrary to contemporary pedagogical thinking, we find that students score higher on standardized tests in the subject in which their teachers spent more time on lecture-style presentations than in the subject in which the teacher devoted more time to problem-solving activities. For both math and science, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecture-style presentations (e.g., increasing the share of time spent lecturing from 20 to 30 percent) is associated with an increase in student test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation. Another way to state the same finding is that students learn less in the classes in which their teachers spend more time on in-class problem solving.

Importantly, the strength of the relationship increases when we restrict our analysis to the roughly one-third of students in the TIMSS sample who had the exact same peers in both their math and science classes. Among this group of students, a shift of 10 percentage points of time from problem solving to lecturing is associated with an increase in test scores of almost 4 percent of a standard deviation—or between one and two months’ worth of learning in a typical school year (see Figure 3). This pattern increases our confidence that the overall result does not reflect differences in the peer composition of students’ math or science classes. In fact, it suggests that peer effects may actually be leading us to understate the strength of the relationship between lecturing and student learning.

I skipped the part of the article that explains that last paragraph: This was quite a large study, which allowed the researchers to dig deep into the data. One of the ways they looked at it was to look at that group of students who had a math teacher who used one method and a science teacher who used the other: in other words, the exact same students were looked at in each class. In this way all socio-economic and other external factors should disappear (such as teachers tailoring their classrooms to the abilities of their students), since they tracked one student through two different classes. In this data they found even stronger correlations between lecture-style teaching and results. Ten percent (10%) more time spent on lecture-style teaching resulted in students getting two more months of learning in one year.

(An unabridged version of the article is available here.) 

Also, another summary of this study is available here: Harvard Study Shows that Lecture-Style Presentations Lead to Higher Student Achievement

(Of course, in the process of looking over this tab I opened four more based on links from this one!)

Constructivism

Constructivism has deep roots in the Common Core.