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.
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