Lisa Delpit, a brilliant African American educator, had critical things to say about constructivist methods in teaching African American students in her book Other People’s Children (1995). She pointed out that the language of the classroom itself was often meaningless to black students and to other students whose language and shared knowledge was not that of the
American print culture that more advantaged American kids absorbed at home. She was particularly critical of methods that we now call
constructivist: discovery learning, inquiry learning, and methods that ask children to work things out for themselves. How are they supposed to do that? she asked. They don’t know what you are talking about.
She was describing the very troubling problem that got me started in the 1980s in educational research. I was gathering some data among freshmen at the University of Virginia, and I decided to broaden the inquiry to include students at a then mostly black college, the J. Sargeant Reynolds
Community College. There I got back a lot of blank sheets. The students hadn’t a clue as to the question I was asking. The question itself had taken too much for granted. Experiences like that, plus immersing myself in psycholinguistics and other branches of cognitive psychology, forcefully brought home the role of unheard and unseen knowledge in understanding speech and writing.
To be a disadvantaged child is to lack the modes of speech, the
vocabulary, and the shared knowledge of the national print culture. Kids who come from circumstances in which the language of the home is standard educated English possess both language and background
knowledge that enables them to move forward in school, even when the teacher asks them to find things out for themselves. The essence of school disadvantage is the lack of requisite prior knowledge to understand, much less perform, a particular task. In the psychological literature, the distinction is drawn between “novices” and “experts.”
The only way the construct-it-for-yourself mode of teaching can work for a child is if she has adequate prior background knowledge to deduce the right inferences. Disadvantaged children usually lack the background knowledge to be able to pull out the right inference from discovery-based methods. The discovery method will therefore tend to increase the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children. Possessing less
knowledge of the print culture, they will not reliably understand the
language of the classroom, and they will be able to construct far fewer new learnings from the small-group projects and learning centers of child-
centered instruction.
But those same disadvantaged students, when given explicit whole-class, sage-on-the-stage instruction, will gain relatively more than advantaged kids will. Here’s why: they have much more to learn. For they have to amass the needed prior knowledge as well as the knowledge focused on within the lesson itself. This explains the Grissmer results noted in chapter 3, in which explicit shared-knowledge instruction caused advantaged students to gain half a standard deviation over constructed-learning
students, even though it caused disadvantaged students to gain two-thirds of a standard deviation over their counterparts in the constructivist
classroom. In short, anybody who favors the principle of equality should favor a definite shared-knowledge curriculum taught by the most effective means, which is almost always through compelling, explicit modes of
instruction. This is particularly true in elementary school, when everyone is a novice, and it’s emphatically so for disadvantaged students.
Here’s the way the distinguished cognitive scientists12 Richard E. Clark, Paul A. Kirschner, and John Sweller sum up the inutility and harm of constructivist methods in the early grades.
After a half century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance instruction, it appears that there is no body of sound research that supports using the technique with anyone other than the most expert students. Evidence from controlled, experimental (a.k.a. “gold standard”) studies almost uniformly supports full and explicit instructional guidance rather than partial or minimal guidance for novice to intermediate learners. . . . Teachers should provide their students with clear, explicit instruction rather than merely assisting students in attempting to discover knowledge themselves.
Part II
Science Debunks Child-Centered
Education
Chapter 5
Culture, Not Nature, Knows Best—
Says Nature
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from EXPERIENCE.
—John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
I
t’s not the fault of our teachers that our students are performing poorly in international comparisons, or that our disadvantaged students lag ever further behind as they proceed through the grades. Instead, the main fault lies with the seductive “child centered” ideas drilled into our teachers’minds, and into the minds of school administrators and state officials—
ideas based on the concept that education is partly a matter of drawing out the child’s inborn nature.