What if I told you that there is a method of education which significantly raises achievement, has been shown to work for students of a wide range of abilities, races, and socio-economic levels and has been shown to be superior to other methods of instruction in hundreds of tests? Well, the method is Direct Instruction
Many years ago, I ordered a book on Direct Instruction. Trust me, you would hate it if you were a teacher. An you might hate it as a student. So it is quite counterintuitive that it works. It is very focused on repetitive drills.
On the other hand, I remember a 6th-grade math teacher who liked to hand out arithmetic speed drills. I didn’t hate those. And maybe having really solid fundamentals is what is important.
Step by step learning should have been the default condition.
I would have reconstructed the problem, show where learning without repetition works, as the exception to the rule.
Repetitive walking first, spontaneous dance second. spontaneous dance being the exception, it is the only form of dance without repetition, by definition.
Back in the early 70s I remember doing a multiplication speed drill daily in 4th grade. Those numbers did sink in!
It’s not remotely counterintuitive that it works, if by “works” you mean it teaches a procedural skill to the point where it becomes automatic. It’s the basis for the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall (“practice, practice, practice”).
It’s not the only way to learn facts. Mnemonics are effective, and learning the relationships between facts is a powerful mnemonic (it uses the innate attraction of stories). It’s why some of us find math and science easy (many relationships between the facts) but history and geography hard (if you don’t know the name of a place, that’s that – it usually has no relationship to anything else). Inquiry-based techniques build the stories. More effective than repetition? Possibly not. Much more pleasant than repetition, for those who naturally learn through stories? Definitely.
And, the value of much rote-learned material is plummeting. Who cares if you know how to extract square roots, read a log table, or do long division? Or know the name of the fourth Tudor monarch, or the capital of Honduras, off the top of your head? Google does these things: market value = zero. Instead, the value of “problem solving” has been rising – and the teaching of “problem solving” is still in its infancy, but it clearly requires creatively re-interpreting relationships between facts (re-interpreting the “story”), and subjectively teachers and parents find inquiry-based approaches more effective in at least some contexts.
Creativity requires expertise. Expertise requires automaticity, which requires repetition, which both requires and builds memory, which leverages relationships.
It brings into question what the goals of education should be. While fundamentals are a necessary foundation and probably more important than given credit, they may not be that important for what we really want achieve with it.
I find it interesting that some people seem to read effortlessly and others struggle endlessly. I have seen phonics drills that are supposed to help with this. The best book I read about the general issue was this one:
https://www.amazon.com/Children-Cant-Read-What-About/dp/0684853566
which says that there are a number of methods that help struggling learners read better.
The author says that learning to read English is non-trivial because of the variety of letter combinations that map with varying degrees of predictability to the phonemes of English, which is in some ways a bit demanding with all its vowel phonemes and diphongs.
Dehaene has written on this, too.
= – = – = – =
I would say I feel smart reading English. I’m a dumbo trying to read Spanish or moreso, French. Russian text is unintelligible–but I know it’s letters. I can sound out a few words with endless patience. Arabic doesn’t even look like letters to me, not really. I once hired an Arabic tutor to help me with the letters, but I didn’t put in the work (I can say some phrases). Devengari characters look like a practical joke being played on me.
What I am getting at is that there is a whole lot of automaticity behind being able to read without effort. I don’t know where it came from for me, but I come from a family of readers. Endlessly as a youngster I read fiction without urging.
Not that this is unusual. At my junior high school, there was no shortage of 7th or 8th graders reading _The Hobbit_ or _The Fellowship of the Ring_ just for fun.
I mention this because it is a different form of practice–but it tends to also result in automaticity over time.
It’s not counterintuitive that it would work for low skill kids learning basic skills. Past that, no evidence exists it works, and zero evidence it works in high school.
I hope you look more deeply into what goes into engineering Direct Instruction lessons and the reasoning behind them. Thinking about them as drill and kill is not sufficient. Its both a great story and a great contrast to other educational approaches. Once you see what they went through to design and test (yes test) the materials the explanation for its effectiveness will be much clearer.
I recommend:
“Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System Kindle Edition
by Siegfried Engelmann”
and
Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools? Kindle Edition
by Siegfried Engelmann
I’ve read the first. Everyone forgets that he said African American kids take much, much longer to reach mastery. Not days. Weeks. For each new thing. Schools are banned from ability grouping. If he’s allowed to group by ability, how is it for sure that the grouping, rather than the curriculum, isn’t the cause?
I’ve also looked at some of his claims that definitely don’t pan out.
Finally, if DI is so amazing, why aren’t all the private schools using it? Because it’s creepy. And awful. No one really likes it. He was shouted out of all sorts of African American schools–he called his opponents the Black Mafia.
It wasn’t just teachers who didn’t like it, but also policy makers, African Americans, and researchers.
Anyone who says it works, period, as opposed to works for low-skill kids learning basic skills and even then we don’t know about fadeout, is speaking without support.