
Getting kids on the right track with early science education - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/08/getting-kids-on-the-right-track-with-early-science-education.ars
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edtechdev
This article is written by someone with no professional training in education
or the learning sciences or instructional design or psychology or teaching. I
don't mean that as ad hominem, but everyone thinks they're an expert in
education, especially when they've read one article on the topic, unaware of
the decades of history and debate and disagreement and biases that are hidden
in it.

The author is just accepting as fact whatever the article says (direct
instruction is best), and then argues that if we had better quantitative
measures of "curiosity" perhaps we could show that more student-centered
methods of instruction are better.

There already are many measures of transfer, understanding, engagement, self-
efficacy, and so forth that show the advantages of more student-centered and
constructivist techniques of instruction in science education such as
simulations, games, problem and project-based learning, interactive
engagement, predict-observe-explain activities, and so forth. For whatever
reason, many researchers and conservative education activists choose to ignore
or dismiss those thousands of studies and focus more on studies that show the
advantages of traditional instructional techniques like lecture,
demonstrations, or word problems. You can cherry pick studies to support any
conclusion you want. You can design and implement a study in education to show
what you want to see - by using intentionally deprived (very sub-optimal)
learning environments, for example. Typically, studies in favor of traditional
techniques are very short, involve simplistic learning measures, and involve
unmotivated students working in a sequestered problem solving environment that
is nothing like the real world or even the classroom.

See the book How People Learn for a primer on this stuff - here's the chapter
on Learning and Transfer (with examples that directly contradict Klahr):
[http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9853&page=51](http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9853&page=51)

