Where Discovery Learning fails and what Statistics ignore

SUMMARY

Using 2 meta-analyses on 164 previous studies, the research aims to investigate the effects of unassisted discovery learning versus explicit instruction, and the effects of enhanced/assisted discovery versus other types of instruction such as explicit direction and unassisted discovery.  After making 580 comparisons, the research revealed that, under most conditions, explicit instructions produced better outcomes than unassisted discovery.  Furthermore, after analyzing 360 comparisons, the researchers concluded that enhanced discovery, which involves preparing, giving instructions, scaffolding and guiding students with immediate feedback produced superior results over unassisted discovery, which, the study suggests, does not benefit learners.  The 164 subject studies were assigned ranks as per its desirability of content, with journals that were appeared in tier 1 and tier 2 publications given the highest ranking, followed by theses and dissertations.  The study was jointly conducted by Louis Alfieri, Patricia Brooks and Naomi J. Aldrich of City University of New York, and Harriet R. Tenenbaum of Kingston University.

INTRODUCTION

Of fish and classrooms

My idea of what discovery learning is prior to reading the study largely hinged on the word discover, and the variables curiosity, creativity, mystery, exploration and freedom, which, to my mind, came hand and glove with it.  It conjured vivid  images of a young, carefree boy, alone in a far away pond on a lazy summer day; eagerly but prematurely yanking his fish hook out of the water at the slightest tug of an unseen fish that he imagines was the size of a dish.  Soon though, he is able to distinguish the nuances between the nibble of a small but colorful Gourami and the sure bite of the edible Tilapia, which he has also realized almost always came in not much bigger than his palm.  And that if he keeps still long enough; a great big catfish will gently slice the water from the edge of the pond, with an army of tiny red fishes, which are actually its fries, jauntily trailing nearby, sprightly and in unison quickly scrambling for the cavernous mouth of the mother fish for safety at the slightest disturbance, say a falling bamboo leaf quietly and gently creasing the surface of the water, or a majestic blue Kingfisher swiftly swooping in from nowhere to catch an unsuspecting Gourami.

But alas, this period of discovery quickly evaporated like a spray of mist on a hot day the moment I read the opening paragraph, giving way instead to a vision of a boy trapped inside a cramped classroom, wondering why everyone seems to be falling in line all the time, and speaking, standing, sitting and all things that once came naturally must now come on the heels of a command, or in deference to a protocol.  School, with its structure, conventions and expectations, is a strange world.  And this can become scary for a child who once believed that discovery learning is unbridled.

Of family and statistics

A child’s academic education, from preschool up to college, is designed to work in stages, with each set of learnings serving as both foundation and link to the next until a point is reached that the student may exit the academe ready to become a productive and, hopefully, responsible member of society – which is basically how the concept of scaffolding works. Because of this highly focused and specialized role, it is incumbent upon educators to impose structure and control, which is loose enough that it may be pushed a little here and there, but is ultimately hard-cased and insulated enough to withstand varying challenges and changes to eventually and consistently deliver what is expected from it: students trained in the rigors of structure.  Hence, it is not just merely a cliché but an apt description that schools shape and mold students to emerge in a certain way – unique in his own right, but ubiquitous in many others.

 I have the joy and privilege of having five older brothers: a lawyer, an architecture major turned writer and editor, an army colonel, a nurse not working as a nurse, an accountant; then myself, a writer, beekeeper, ex-teacher-who-wants-to-be-a-current-teacher, and a graduate student. 

One can say that our individual performances in school, based on commonly accepted criteria, may in itself form an Enginco version of the Bell’s Curve, with my lawyer and Fulbright scholar eldest brother occupying one extreme end, followed closely by my CPA/MBA, and MA in Psychology candidate sibling, and the youngest me – the outlier, the one usually dismissed by statistics as an aberration, at the other end, with everyone else sandwiched in between.  While statistics is a familiar and indispensable tool in research, I believe that every time a person or a phenomenon becomes a faceless number that essential parts of the subject are lost somewhere along the periphery of the measures of central tendency.

Thus, while I wanted to concentrate my discussion on the central findings of this study, the constant resurfacing of recollection from my school years as I read and analyzed the journal has nudged me a bit off tangent, compelling me to write about how I think schooling is stifling creativity and curiosity in many students, and how research is unwittingly justifying it with the use of statistics.

DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS

Of discovery and the perils of efficient learning

While the research design and methodology are rigorous and exhaustive to say the least, the findings, for the most part, are neither groundbreaking nor totally unexpected.  The study reveals, or confirms that common classroom discovery teaching strategies can effect a range of outcomes for learners.   For instance, while unassisted discovery learning allows, at least in principle, for maximum freedom to explore to the learner, the lack of direction and clear goals from teachers renders it useless in as far as attaining objectives is concerned.   This is particularly most noticeable in young children whose shallow schematic knowledge practically makes unassisted discovery learning activities no more than mere exercises in random child’s play.  Self-directed learning, apparently does not work inside the classroom.  In addition, giving the child a naïve peer to work with will work just as poorly; however, on a positive note, the probability to see two happy children blissfully toying around with materials that were intended to be put together in a certain way, infinitely increases.  And I say infinite only because the study does not consider this as a legitimate learning goal.

There is a world of difference in learning inside of the classroom and outside of it.  The former requires structure by way of goals, procedures and parameters, while the latter, though they may have the same in one form or another, are not bound by certain expectations and conventions to finding, or rather discovering lessons wherever and whenever they may present itself, by accident or deduction.  The former breeds engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, soldiers and other vocations that find comfort and success in structure and instructions; the latter inspires artists, entrepreneurs and dreamers who find order in chaos and opportunity in seemingly disjointed occurrences.  Unfortunately, the steep structures of the educational system all but insure that by the time children, who by their innocence and youth are by nature creative and curious, come out of the educational millstone, only a few still remain dreamy-eyed and eager to pursue passions, and not just mere professions.  It is not surprising that many dreamers who cannot bear the restrictions of school either decide or are forced to drop out so that they may follow the dictates of their heart.

While I understand that that’s how the world works, I feel that inculcating and nurturing in students elements that are virtually unmeasurable and intangible such as love for the arts and creativity, connectedness with humanity and affinity for nature, and the desire to make a difference in the lives of others is just as, if not more important than equipping them with the necessary tools and wherewithal for productivity, consumption and getting ahead of everybody in a dog-eat-dog rat race.  Essentially, I feel that humanity is being eroded, albeit unintentionally, by the very institution that should foster it by sheer attention to what is measurable and palpable.  And this is helped along in large part by society’s over dependence on technology, whose convenience and limitless potential has supplanted human interaction and good old-fashioned hard work that builds strong character.

So, what works?

The study reports that learners perform better on an assigned task when they are shown worked samples and given explicit instructions than when they are simply provided materials to work with, with no goal or implied method to use.  Then, it becomes noticeable that the more intervention introduced into the action, the more agreeable the learning experience is in relation to the set goals.  Such as when immediate feedback is added to the mix, learning goals are more efficiently met.  But the most effective way, according to the study, is when the students are prepared before the activity, given what is expected from them, provided with clear and detailed instructions, and afforded immediate feedback as they are in the process of conducting their learning program.  This is now called enhanced discovery learning.  I see how this strategy will work most of the time; there’s just so little room to commit mistakes, and in the event that it happens, there’s just too little time wasted before it is duly corrected.  Hence, with due respect to its formulators, I no longer see the appropriateness of the semantic enhanced discovery learning, because the way I see it, the learner already knows what’s going to happen, and what’s transpiring at every stage of the process, including the end-product even before it materializes.  Now where is the discovery in that?  While this strategy optimizes learning, I am afraid that when done exclusively and with greater efficiency that this is exactly the kind of schooling that extinguishes or places curiosity and self-discovery in the learner’s backburner.

Case in point: The finding that enhanced discovery learning works better in adult learners than child learners, which the researchers say is rather surprising. On the contrary, I would like to think that this is proof that the longer one is exposed to this method as learners with more advanced age are, the better and more dependent they are to such strategy.  However, the younger the learners are, the more apparent the resistance to such strategy will be, given that the youngsters presumably still enjoy a higher state of curiosity, creativity and playfulness, which have yet to be tempered and shaped by the cushions of structure.

The systematic blurring of faces

The research at hand, being a meta-analysis, is rigorous to undertake and exhausting to analyze, given the comprehensive collection of materials and the ensuing complexity of cross-references and permutations involved.  It is meticulous, detailed and ambitious – exactly the kind of study that only seasoned and deeply knowledgeable researchers with a firm grasp of statistics, coupled with equal parts confidence and determination can hope to pursue with a measure of success. 

The key to good statistics is to prune down a population into a highly representative sample, then parsing the information provided by the respondents into numerical data that can be read, scrutinized and analyzed in an unbiased, objective manner.  These numbers are generally categorized into the mean, median and mode – the measures of central tendency, where the highest and lowest scores are normally disregarded in the analysis; leaving the data in the middle as representative of what the population does and thinks.  The best part of valid statistics is that valuable insights that can be generalized into the population can be gleaned.  The worst part, however, is that it only goes as far as generalization, not to an absolute declaration of infallibility, precisely because the data cannot explain or account for what the outliers truly think or do.  After all, these have been expunged from the information.

The various statistical treatments employed by the researchers, including the segregation of subject researches into classifications of reliability with studies published in tier 1 and tier 2 publications enjoying preferential bias over theses and dissertations, all but ensure that the samples are as homogeneous as can be.  Apparently, in statistics the more one person looks like everyone else, the greater the desirability and reliability of his offered information.

It is when the human face is replaced with an indistinguishable likeness that I fear statistics can miss essentially crucial leads to far deeper insights.  I would like to believe that if only the views and actions of the outliers are given more attention than they  are getting, which in statistics is practically nil, that a lot of the problems that a lot of people don’t understand and thus can’t seem to find a solution to may find a new and hopeful light.  A fresh perspective can make a world of difference specially if the views, conditions and solutions that were existing and not working for a very long time are the ones that appear constantly on the measures of central tendency.

CONCLUSION

I am a beekeeper.  And in most probability, I don’t share the same profession with 99.99% of the population.  Interestingly, scientists say that bees are central to the survival of the environment, and consequently of human existence because bees pollinate roughly 2/3 of the foods that humans consume, and practically all the foods that land animals that people eat will need to live.  If the bees go, plant life would follow, animal life not long after, and then human life as well.  At the rate bees are dying because of heavy pesticides use and the rapid degradation of their habitat, beekeepers like me who belong to the slimmest of the minority are probably doing a lot more in protecting the environment and saving lives than the rest of 99.99% of the population.  But statistically, we are simply insignificant.

I am still not comfortable inside the classroom; I often feel that I don’t belong.  But the big difference today and when I was a much younger student is that I love where I’m at and what I am doing.   I am an asset to the class, and the academe in general because I can offer an outsider’s perspective and challenge conventions, which an insider won’t likely do.  That is one effective way of pushing the breadth of learning, and enriching the depth as well. 

If statistical data from my early years of schooling would be used to predict the likelihood of my success in graduate school, then I am positive that it would be a negative, and it may even conclude that I would not be even thinking about entering graduate school at all, let alone aspiring to become a teacher.  After all, numbers don’t tell a specific story or bother to look into context. It just “objectively” predicts.

I am, in many ways, an outlier.  While many look into the cutthroat corporate world to secure their future, I look to a simpler life to ensure its quality.  When others find enjoyment in the conveniences and perks of modern technology, I find satisfaction in creating something with my mind and hands.  If I employ technology, then it must be for a higher purpose other than enjoyment.  I recently bought a welding machine to complement my growing list of equipment that will help me create things for myself and the people I love, things that are extensions of my imagination and purpose in life.  I don’t find many people like me, and yet I meet a lot of people inspired by me and what I do.  Apparently, inspiration does not happen when it is commonplace.

Why am I like this?  I wouldn’t attribute it to my early schooling.  In fact, I survived education with my creativity and passion for learning intact largely because I ignored school conventions.  I am like this because long ago, I was alone by a pond somewhere in Pangasinan, looking at fish, birds and bamboo as the world passes by, and like statistics, not knowing that I exist.  This, for me, is what true discovery learning is.