Achieving greater equity
through explicit instruction
Greg Ashman
www.gregashman.wordpress.com
@greg_ashman
[email protected]
This PowerPoint will be available on my Blog site in the next few days
About me
• Teacher
• Blogger
• Writer
• Part-time PhD student
direct instruction
DISTAR
explicit instruction
traditional teaching
lecturing
active learning
Direct
Instruction
direct instruction
explicit instruction
Direct Instruction
my definition
lecturing
default teacher-led
instruction
Principles of Instruction, Barak Rosenshine
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Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.
Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step.
Ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students.
Provide models.
Guide student practice.
Check for student understanding.
Obtain a high success rate.
Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks.
Require and monitor independent practice.
Engage students in weekly and monthly review.
Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36(1), 12
Process-Product research
• Not without criticism
• Evidence base biased towards early grades
• Mostly correlational
• Sources on this research:
- Thorough review: Brophy, J. E., & Good, T. L. (1984). Teacher behavior and
student achievement (No. 73). Institute for Research on Teaching, Michigan
State University.
- More approachable: Chall, J. S. (2000). The Academic Achievement Challenge:
What Really Works in the Classroom?. Guilford Publications
Thomas Good’s List (and a caution)
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Appropriate Expectations.
Supportive Classrooms.
Effective Use of Time.
Opportunity to Learn.
Coherent Curriculum in Sequence.
Active Teaching.
Balance Procedural and Conceptual Knowledge.
Proactive Management.
Teacher Clarity, Enthusiasm, and Warmth.
Instructional Curriculum Pace.
Teaching to Mastery.
Review and Feedback.
Adequate Subject Matter Knowledge.
Good, T., (2015, January). Research on Teaching: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Paper presented at the International Congress for School
Effectiveness and Improvement, Cincinnati, Ohio
Project Follow Through
• Part of the process-product body of research
• Largest educational experiment ever undertaken
• Direct Instruction (DISTAR) was the most effective model
• Controversy over the results
• High/Scope analysis
Bereiter, C., & Kurland, M. (1981). A constructive look at Follow Through results. Interchange, 12(1), 1-22.
Schweinhart, L. L., Weikart, D. P., & Larner, M. B. (1986). Consequences of three preschool curriculum models through age 15. Early Childhood
Research Quarterly, 1(1), 15-45.
Gersten, R., & White, W. A. T. (1986). Castles in the sand: Response to Schweinhart and Weikart. Educational Leadership, 44(3), 19-20.
Muijs and Reynolds
• British process-product studies
• ORACLE study
• Teachers labelled ‘class enquirers’ showed greatest gains in maths and
language
• ‘Class enquirers’ spent four times as much time using whole-class interactive
teaching than the least effective group
• Junior School Project – similar findings to Good, Rosenshine
• Weakly supported by other European research
• “A crucial part of the direct instruction lesson is interactive
questioning.”
Muijs, Daniel, and David Reynolds. Effective teaching: Evidence and practice. Sage, 2010.
Strategy Instruction
• Ill-structured tasks / hard to break down into discrete steps
‒ Reading comprehension
‒ Writing
‒ Mathematical and scientific problem solving
• Emphasis on providing guides and supports
• Think-alouds by experts / questioning strategies – Who? How? What?
• Researchers refer to providing ‘direct instruction’ in these techniques
• Evidence of effectiveness
Rosenshine, B., (2009). The Empirical Support for Direct Instruction. In S. Tobias & T. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure (pp.
201-220). Routledge New York, NY
Other evidence
• Randomised controlled trials
‒ Large scale maths teaching innovation in Costa Rica involving exploration and
discovery
• Correlational studies (that are not process-product)
‒ U.S. study linking TIMSS results to teaching style (lecture style)
‒ Other suggestive data from PISA 2012 and PISA 2015 around relative
effectiveness of teacher-directed instruction and a ‘student-orientation’
‒ Principals views in Denmark: Teacher-led vs student centred
• Worked example effect
The PISA index of teachers’ student orientation is constructed using
students’ reports on the frequency with which, in mathematics lessons:
• the teacher gives students different work to classmates who have
difficulties learning and/or to those who can advance faster
• the teacher assigns projects that require at least one week to complete
• the teacher has students work in small groups to come up with a joint
solution to a problem or task
• the teacher asks students to help plan classroom activities or topic
OECD, 2015, “The Role of Teachers and Schools in Shaping Students’ Engagement, Drive and Self Beliefs”
Caro, et. al., 2016 found a negative
relationship between PISA’s measure of
student orientation and maths
performance in most countries.
Graph not available for online
publication
“Student-oriented instruction was
negatively related to mathematics
performance in every education system.
Further, unreported analysis showed that
none of the constituent items of the
student oriented instruction scale was
positively related to mathematics
performance in any education system. The
consistency of evidence across education
systems is striking and at odds with our
expectations.”
Caro, D. H., Lenkeit, J., & Kyriakides, L. (2016). Teaching strategies
and differential effectiveness across learning contexts: Evidence
from PISA 2012. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 49, 30-41.
Jeanne Chall
“The methods with the highest positive effects on learning are those for
which the teacher assumes direction, for example, letting students
know what is to be learned and explaining how to learn it,
concentrating on tasks, correcting errors, and rewarding of activities –
characteristic found in traditional, teacher-centered education…
Quite consistently, when results were analysed by socioeconomic status,
it was the more traditional education that produced the better
academic achievement among children from low-income families.”
Example: Kroesbergen et. al., 2004
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Subjects were low achieving mathematics students from the Netherlands
ABC design
A – standard maths lessons (control)
B – standard maths lessons plus constructivist intervention
C – standard maths lessons plus explicit intervention
Both interventions were better than the control but the explicit intervention
was superior to the constructivist intervention
link
Why might it be more equitable?
less
implicit instruction
• whole language
• project based learning
• problem based learning
• inquiry learning
• discovery learning
• constructivist teaching
Default level of
explanation:
How we explain
concepts in
everyday life
more
explicit instruction
Cognitive load theory
Long-term memory
Effectively limitless
Working
Memory
new content
constrained
Sweller, J. (2016). Story of a Research Program. Education Review//Reseñas Educativas, 23.
Expertise
Long-term memory
LOADS OF STUFF
Working
Memory
now effectively
unconstrained
Implicit methods suit
students with greater
expertise
Limitations of explicit instruction
• Do students understand things better if they work them out for
themselves?
‒ Klahr and Nigam study
‒ Productive failure / Preparation for future learning
Klahr, D., & Nigam, M. (2004). The equivalence of learning paths in early science instruction effects of direct instruction and discovery learning.
Psychological Science, 15(10), 661-667.
Schwartz, D. L., & Martin, T. (2004). Inventing to prepare for future learning: The hidden efficiency of encouraging original student production in
statistics instruction. Cognition and Instruction, 22(2), 129-184.
Kapur, M. (2014). Productive failure in learning math. Cognitive Science, 38(5), 1008-1022.
Limitations of explicit instruction
• Do students gain non-cognitive skills from other methods of
instruction?
‒ Chall, “A few research studies that compared the effects on nonacademic
learning were favourable toward the student-centred programs, but those
advantages were less pronounced than the discrepancy in academic
achievement.”
Limitations of explicit instruction
• Variety / Motivation
• Expertise reversal effect
Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2003). The expertise reversal effect. Educational psychologist, 38(1), 23-31.
The Guilt
My ebook, “Ouroboros,” can be purchased from
my blog site – gregashman.wordpress.com
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