Comment by mlyle
5 months ago
Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?
I've only seen pretty limited, pretty confounded evidence for it. A lot of studies I've seen are studies of students in charter programs, but these studies tend to ignore pretty big selection effects (e.g. comparing students to the general student population, when studies have found that students entered into charter lotteries who are not selected do about as well as those who get to go to the charter school).
I definitely use recitation in my classroom where there's a body of knowledge, but I typically reserve it for situations where it's clear that there's less need for deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
As we look forward, it seems like there's a lot less value in having a broad body of knowledge and much more usefulness in being able to fluidly apply concepts in comparison to 19th century practice. Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span and cooperation and relied pretty heavily on corporal punishment to make them work.
I have pretty limited, indirect tools to get students to put in high effort. There's the gradebook and their general desire to do well, which isn't a terribly effective mechanism even though I am teaching an affluent, motivated group... and there's whatever social pressures I can foster in the classroom to encourage students to value performance.
> deeper critical thinking or application of concepts.
These things come after one has the basics down pat. Modern "Progressive" education rejects this point altogether. It's whole approach is entirely founded on putting the cart before the horse.
> Further, blab schools were really pretty demanding of attention span
Attention span is a function of engagement. As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students for whom other drivers of high effort mighy be not nearly as effective, as you hint at.
> hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students
There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers, no critical thought or deeper understanding of the concepts was expected. That was not engaging. That style of "education" had me failing classes and hating every waking moment of school. It was only the last year of HS that I started to shine after hitting AP classes with more interesting topics that required some deeper understanding and mastery. If I hadn't experienced non-rote classes my last year I might be a janitor now.
> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers
Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it to just get the rote learning part done with in the easiest, quickest and most effective way, by employing the structured approaches that are ignored by most teachers today?
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I asked for sources, not a quibble on a sub-point.
I disagree. I like rote and rigor, but I think it's a mistake to ignore developing problem solving and intuition early. A lot of programs overshoot, but figuring out how to make decent guesses and test them is important (as is getting lots of practice on well-defined problems).
edit: it looks like you're editing your comment. You added:
> As it turns out, hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity
I disagree here, too. ;) I mean, yes, it can be, but we have other tools in our toolbox. The hammer is useful but has diminishing returns as we try and apply it more and more.
> developing problem solving and intuition early.
There's no reason why these things couldn't be developed in a more "structured" approach than the default (avoiding the overshooting you mention). The quick feedback cycle for every answer is really the most critical point.
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> Can you please provide some evidence that this kind of scripted and recitation-heavy instruction is beneficial compared to other approaches?
Singapore/Hong Kong/Japan/Taiwan/Macau dominating the PISA
Singapore's math program in elementary is actually much less recitation and rote based than we are used to in Western mathematics education.
Indeed, it's very much pictorial and intuition-building in ways that fans of DI tend to look down on. It's concept and problem solving before rote.
I don't know so much about these countries in primary education, but I do have a few Japanese textbooks from secondary school translated into English and published by the AMS. This material also seems less rote-heavy than I am used to.
E.g. I'm looking at an on-level grade 7 mathematics textbook, and it's spending a lot of pages justifying the idea of negative numbers in addition and subtraction and with pictorial representation and has comparably few problems to do.
In a US math textbook, this material would have been done before grade 7, but in less depth. There would be a whole lot of rules, algorithms, and rote practice.