Why I’m Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling - Scott H Young

Ultralearning

Get Better at Anything

Being the guy who wrote a book called Ultralearning, I get asked a lot of questions about what I think schools should be doing better.

 Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer. It’s a bit like asking a guy to reform an entire health care system because he’s good at lifting weights.

But being totally unqualified has never stopped me before, so I’ll try to explain the answer I typically give to this question, which is that I’m skeptical of dramatic proposals to make school considerably more effective or efficient for the average student.

To be clear, that’s not because no improvement is possible. We do know some about things that work that are inconsistently applied: phonics should be taught, cognitive load should be managed, skills should be fully taught and practice should be fun and ample.

But these answers aren’t the kind that satisfy the people who ask me these questions. Instead, having had many of these conversations, I feel like the person asking already “knows” what my response should be:

Isn’t it obvious that school sucks? That we should be teaching critical thinking and problem-solving skills instead of useless facts and theories? That school should be more like real life, with real-world projects and experiments and collaboration? That there should be less of that stuffy work of sitting at a desk and memorizing things?

If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you. It took reading a lot of research to convince me that this intuitively appealing idea is actually bad. Below, I’d like to explain why.

First, the Evidence

Before I get into the explanation of why these kinds of seemingly-good strategies don’t work, I should begin by pointing out that these ideas are not new. They have been tried, and they have been found wanting.

Entire books have been written pointing out the flaws in many of these strategies. I won’t be able to do the full debate justice here, but, if you’re interested, you can check out Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? Greg Ashman’s The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction or, if you want to learn more about the actual debate between proponents of both sides, try Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure.

To briefly recap some of the evidence:

Project Follow Through was one of the largest educational experiments ever conducted. Run in the 1970s, it compared how different teaching methodologies impact student outcomes. Direct Instruction, a method of teaching that has students sit in desks and perform extremely structured drills in unison, performed best.

Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students.

Despite needing to relearn this truth every few decades, the best way to teach kids how to read has been known for centuries: break down the sound-spelling correspondence, and do lots of practice on it before moving up to authentic texts. Approaches based on skipping these drills in favor of “inspiring a love of reading” do worse.

Practice testing and distributed practice—basically, having regular quizzes spread out over a course—are the studying methods with the best empirical support. Fancy methods like mnemonics and concept maps fare worse.

General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.

In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice.productive failure doesn’t undermine this finding, contrary to some misinterpretations. Kapur’s research simply finds that the timing of instruction has some effects. Sometimes, for certain kinds of skills, in certain kinds of environments, attempting to solve a problem first and failing can be helpful for later understanding the solution procedure that is fully taught.'>1 Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise.

Your Stereotype of School is an Endangered Species

This doesn’t mean education couldn’t be better. My impression upon first encountering the Direct Instruction research was that I had never been taught this way in my entire life.

Clichés are often out of date. I went to grade school in...