Psychologist Paul Kirschner explains why discovery learning doesn’t work, and is more time-consuming than just teaching kids the facts. Kirschner is the author of How Learning Happens and How Teaching Happens.
“Discovery learning” emphasizes students “engaging with their environment to explore, investigate and construct knowledge instead of being taught or instructed,” says Kirschner. “But there are a heck of a lot of problems” with that approach.
It’s “incredibly pervasive” in U.S. schools, and in England, Belgium and the Netherlands, says Kirschner. But, after 20 to 25 years of declining test scores, educators have finally figured out that it’s “widened the equity gap instead of closing it.” So Belgium and England are moving to evidence-based teaching methods and “knowledge-rich curriculum” in search of acceptable academic outcomes.
He elaborates on why discovery learning is a failure in his recent essay, The Seductive Appeal of Discovery Learning.
Kirschner discovered that unstructured exploration overwhelms students’ working memory. They end up juggling so many things that they can’t learn anything new. It’s time-consuming, often leads to misconceptions and “the frustration from repeated failures often undermines motivation and satisfaction.”
Students with prior knowledge may be able to think strategically when confronted by discoveries, but novices rely on random guessing, he found. Expecting novices to “think like a scientist” or “think like a mathematician” is silly. They just don’t know enough to look at things scientifically.
While “discovery” students are active and busy, they often don’t comprehend what they’re doing. Activity is not a proxy for learning.
Holly Korbey recalls making Beowulf’s arm out of paper-mache. But “what did you understand about Beowulf afterwards?” asked Kirschner (not much):
Children who are supposed to be learning about volcanoes and volcanism make paper-mache volcanoes, fill a bottle with Coca-Cola and they throw two Mentos mints in and foam comes out of it . . . if you ask them afterwards from, how does magma different from lava? How does plate tectonics relate to volcanism? They have no idea what you’re talking about because they’ve been active but not actively cognitively learning.
After students have already been taught scientific facts, they can deepen their understanding through projects and field work, Kirschner observes. “But if you don’t know anything, you can’t understand anything. . . . How are you going to question, analyze and apply knowledge that you don’t have?”
But discovery learning remains pervasive in progressive jurisdictions like California, harming math and science education. “Students will teach themselves math,” under a “draft of California’s K-12 math curriculum framework,” wrote Bill Evers and Ze’ev Wurman at EdSource. It’s a fad called discovery learning, in which students struggle to learn math on their own, rather than teachers teaching it to them. In practice, that means students’ parents will have to teach them math at home, because they won’t learn much at school. This sort of “learning” may be more fun for bored teachers, but it can make life miserable for busy parents, and leave students unprepared for jobs or colleges that require proficiency in math.
As Joanne Jacobs explains in “Why make math harder than it has to be?”
The framework calls for “student-led” instruction, “active learning,” “active inquiry,” and “collaborative” instruction, they write. It dismisses direct instruction.
It won’t work, write Evers, director of the Center on Educational Excellence at the Independent Institute, and Wurman, who’s also affiliated with the institute.
In the spring 2012 issue of American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, top educational psychologists Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller summarized “decades of research” that “clearly demonstrates” that for almost all students, “direct, explicit instruction” is “more effective” than inquiry-based progressive education in math.
Instead, the framework uses “struggle” (or “struggling”) more than 75 times, they write. The theory is that students learn more when they figure something out for themselves instead of being taught. There’s no mention that “research warns against excessive struggle as time-wasting and discouraging, often leaving students with incorrect understanding.”
Evers and Wurman are authors of ‘Critical Math’ Doesn’t Add Up, which argues that math teaching should not be ideological.
