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Published on May 31, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 3 min read
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Minister of Education Demetrios Nicolaides provides an update on the next steps in public engagement on the draft social studies curriculum at Belgravia Schools on March 14, 2024. Also in attendance were Edmonton Public Schools Board Chair Julie Krzyek and Edmonton Catholic Schools Board Chair Sandra Palazzo. Photo by Sean Battus/Postmedia
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Teaching children a coherent body of knowledge, including important historical facts and events, is expected to be a goal widely shared by educators and parents. But for too long, education elites have clung to theories that downplay the importance of knowledge acquisition, such as discovery learning, experiential learning, inquiry learning, constructivist learning, and more recently, 21st century learning.
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It's a great sounding name. The problem is that it doesn't work.
Their proponents believe that children can develop critical thinking skills without first mastering a body of knowledge. They present us with a choice: students can either memorize a bunch of “useless” facts, or they can engage in “deeper learning” and develop independent minds. Given such a choice, which would you choose?
This is at the heart of the debate surrounding the Alberta government's finally-launched new K-6 social studies curriculum. But it's a false dilemma. In the end, we need both. The less students know, the less they can think critically.
Evidence about how the brain works supports this view. Australian educational psychologist John Sweller and his colleagues conclude that “empirical evidence from the past half century has consistently shown that minimally guided instruction is less effective and efficient than instructional approaches that focus on directing students' learning processes.” Only then can students reason well.
Yet too little of this research reaches teachers. When former teacher-turned-researcher Daisy Christodoulou found evidence that supported her own teacher commitment to inquiry-based learning, she was shocked. “After three years of teaching, I took a year off to further my studies,” Christodoulou says. “I was shocked to stumble upon a field of educational science research that completely contradicted many of the theories I had been taught in my training and education. I was not only shocked, I was angry.” She was inspired to write Seven Myths of Education to uncover the evidence that her teacher training college had been keeping from her.
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So it was heartening to see the Alberta government finally take a stand against the “discovery learning” trend in 2019. As expected, Alberta’s first draft curriculum was summarily rejected by teachers unions and various school boards across the province. While their commitment to low-content “discovery learning” is profound, there is evidence that it is not achieving the goals its proponents promise.
But rather than simply improving the first draft of the knowledge-rich curriculum it commissioned, the government has significantly backtracked to appease critics. But the end result is at least a step in the right direction.
The Alberta government needs to stop this from going backwards. Discovery learning doesn't work, and it never will. I can attest to this from experience.
Despite British Columbia's emphasis on discovery-learning approaches, many students arrive in my university classes each year knowing less and being less able to think critically than ever before. The promise that students can magically learn to think without any thought content in long-term memory is the 21st century version of selling a quack pill. The Alberta government should stop buying it.
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Alberta is bucking the “educational correctness” that has long dominated curriculum development. Some influential voices will make a fuss and seek a return to the past. But in doing so, they will be falling into a predictable cycle that Sweller’s research also uncovers: “Since the mid-1950s, every decade in which empirical research has provided solid evidence that the then-popular no-tutoring approach doesn’t work, a similar approach has emerged under a different name, and the cycle has repeated itself.”
“The new group advocating the unguided approach seems unaware or uninterested in the past evidence that the unguided approach has not been tested.”
Proponents of discovery learning seem either not interested in discovery learning or incapable of thinking critically about it, and they work desperately to stop others from criticizing it.
Alberta could finally be the leader in breaking this cycle.
Dr. David W. Livingston is a Senior Fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and Professor of Liberal Arts and Political Science at Vancouver Island University.
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