Educators have long debated the best way to teach, especially the subjects of science and math. One side favors direct instruction, where teachers tell students what they need to know or students read it from textbooks. Some call it explicit or traditional instruction. The other side favors inquiry, where students conduct experiments and figure out the answers themselves like a scientist would. It’s also known as exploration, discovery learning or simply “scientific practices.”

The debate reignited among university professors during the pandemic with the 2021 online publication of a commentary in the journal Educational Psychology Review. Combatively titled “There is an Evidence Crisis in Science Educational Policy,” four experts in science education argued that the evidence for inquiry instruction is weak and that proponents of inquiry “exclude” or “mark as irrelevant” high-quality studies, particularly controlled trials, that “overwhelmingly show minimal support” for inquiry learning.  

One of the authors is the prominent Australian psychologist John Sweller, who formulated cognitive load theory, the widely accepted idea that our working memory can process only so much information at once. Other academics took notice. Traditionalists applauded it.

Sweller and his co-authors’ complaints date back to an influential 1996 report of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academies of Sciences that shapes science education policy. The report encouraged science teachers to adopt an inquiry-based approach, and it was followed by similar calls from other policymakers. But the authors of the 2021 article said the council’s references for this policy change were “theoretical ideas packaged in conceptual articles rather than empirical evidence.”

The critics say that much of the positive evidence for inquiry comes from classroom studies where there are no control or comparison groups, making it impossible to know if inquiry is really better than alternatives. And they say that this research frequently lumps together inquiry instruction with other teaching practices and interventions, making it hard to disentangle how much the use of inquiry is making a difference. 

Soon after, another group of prominent education researchers issued a rebuttal. In March 2023, 13 scholars led by a Dutch researcher, Ton de Jong, took on the debate in the academic journal Educational Research Review. Titled “Let’s talk evidence – The case for combining inquiry-based and direct instruction,” their article acknowledged that the research is complicated and doesn’t unequivocally point to the superiority of inquiry-based learning. Some studies show inquiry is better. Some studies show direct instruction is better. Many show that students learn the same amount either way.  (As they walked through a series of meta-analyses that summarized hundreds of studies, they pointedly noted that inquiry critics also ignored or mischaracterized some of the research.) 

Their bottom line: “Inquiry-based instruction produces better overall results for acquiring conceptual knowledge than does direct instruction.” 

How could two groups of scholars look at the same body of research and come to opposite conclusions?

The first thing to notice is that the two groups of scholars are arguing about two different things. The inquiry critics pointed out that inquiry wasn’t great at helping students learn content and skills. The inquiry defenders emphasize that inquiry is better at helping students develop conceptual understandings. Different teaching methods may be better for different learning goals.

The second takeaway is that even this group of 13 inquiry defenders argue that teachers should use both approaches, inquiry and direct instruction. That’s because students also need to learn content and procedural skills, which are best taught through direct instruction, and in part because it would be boring to learn only one way all the time. 

Indeed, even the critics of inquiry instruction noted that inquiry lessons and exercises may be better at sparking a love of science. Students often say they enjoy science more or become more interested in the field after an inquiry lesson. Changing students’ attitudes about science is certainly not a compelling reason to teach this way all the time, as students need to learn content too, but even traditionalists admit there’s something to be gained from fun exploration. 

My third observation is that the inquiry defenders listed a bunch of caveats about when inquiry learning has proven to be most effective. Unstructured inquiry lessons where students groped in the dark weren’t successful in building any kind of understanding.

Caveat 1: Students need a strong foundation of knowledge and skills in order for inquiry learning to be successful. In other words, students need some facts and the ability to calculate things in different ways to take advantage of inquiry learning and arrive at deeper conceptual understandings. Complete mastery isn’t a prerequisite, but some familiarity is. The authors suggested, for example, that it can be beneficial to start with some direct instruction before launching into an inquiry lesson. 

Caveat 2: Inquiry learning is far more effective when students receive a lot of guidance and feedback from their teacher during an inquiry lesson. Sometimes the most appropriate guidance is a clear explanation, the authors said, which is the same as direct instruction. (My brain started to hurt, thinking about how direct instruction could be woven into inquiry-based learning. Is it really inquiry learning if you’re also telling students what they need to do or know? At some point, shouldn’t we be labeling it direct instruction with hands-on activities?) 

The 13 authors admitted that each student needs different amounts and types of guidance during an inquiry lesson. Low-achieving students appear to benefit more from guidance than middle- or high-achieving students. But low-achieving students also need more of it. And that can be tough, if not impossible for a single teacher to manage. I began to wonder if effective inquiry teaching is humanly possible.

Not only can inquiry include a lot of direct instruction, but sometimes direct instruction can resemble an inquiry classroom. While many people may imagine that direct instruction means that students are passively absorbing information through lectures or books, the inquiry defenders explained that students can and should be engaged in activities even when a teacher is practicing direct instruction. Students still solve problems, practice new things independently, build projects and conduct experiments. The core difference can be a subtle one and hinge upon whether the teacher explains the theory to the students first or shows examples before students try it themselves (direct), or if the teacher asks students to figure out the theories and the procedures themselves, but gives them explicit guidance along the way (inquiry).

Like all long-standing academic debates, this one is far from resolved. Some educators prefer inquiry; some prefer direct instruction.  Depending upon your biases, you’re likely to see a complicated, mixed body of research as glass half full or glass half empty.

In December 2023, Sweller and the inquiry critics wrote a response to the rebuttal in the same Educational Research Review journal.  Beyond the academic sniping and nitpicking, the two sides seem to have found some common ground.

“Our view… is that explicit instruction is essential for novices” but that as students gain knowledge, there should be “an increasing emphasis on independent problem-solving practice,” Sweller and his camp wrote.  “To the extent that De Jong et al. (2023) agree that explicit instruction can be important, we appear to have reached some level of agreement.”

The real test will be watching to see whether that consensus makes it to the classroom.

This story about teaching strategies was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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How do you test students during remote learning? I’ve heard about problems ranging from widespread cheating to technological glitches. So a recent study caught my attention because it may have landed upon a clever pandemic workaround that could also change the way many college professors administer exams even when we return to in-person learning.

First, I have to tell you about an unusual type of test called a two-stage exam.  In a two-stage exam, students take the same exam twice in a row. The first time, students take it individually in the lecture hall, the traditional way. Then, working in small groups of three to five students, they answer the same questions again. Proponents say the student discussions (and animated arguments!) help everyone fix misunderstandings and errors and remember the material better. Skeptics say it’s difficult to schedule and wonder whether everyone is really learning enough during the group stage to justify devoting the extra class time to testing. 

Two-stage exams sometimes go by other names — such as pyramid exams or collaborative testing — but whatever the name, the approach has slowly been gaining popularity in college science classes over the past decade. Both Harvard University and the University of California Merced happened to be administering two-stage midterms in their introductory physics classes when the pandemic hit during the spring of 2020. (The UC instructor, Kristina Callaghan, was a graduate student of Louis Deslauriers at Harvard and carried the two-step practice with her to California.) The first midterm exam of the semester had already been completed in person at both institutions. The second midterm was still to come. Callaghan and Deslauriers agreed to try the two-stage format online.

Students, working from their homes, took the individual test directly on the computer on a specified date and time — synchronously — for an hour and a half. Then, in groups of three to four students, they had 24 hours to retake the test over a video app like Zoom, FaceTime or SnapChat. Some even completed the group exam during an old-fashioned telephone conference call. Students scheduled the collaborative stage at their own convenience — in effect, retaking the test asynchronously.

The instructors documented what happened and compared the outcomes of in-person and remote group testing. Students gave similar positive ratings to both formats when asked about their levels of engagement, collaboration and feedback. More importantly, students remembered the material long after the online version of the two-step exam was over. For example, students at Harvard scored 10 percentage points higher — 94 percent, on average —  on a post-test three weeks after the midterm. That kind of improvement and long-term recall is consistent with previous studies on the benefits of two-step exams.

“There are no more obstacles to doing two-stage exams,” said Deslauriers, one of the authors of the unpublished working paper documenting the results. “You don’t have to cut your midterm in half to make time for the group exam, or you don’t have to annoy your students by asking them to come at night. And don’t worry, students are going to enjoy it pretty much as they did in person.”

In the future, when in-person school resumes, Deslauriers said he would administer the individual part in person in the lecture hall, as before, but he might allow students to complete the group exam asynchronously on their own time. 

During the remote-testing experiment, Deslauriers learned that students preferred completing the group portion of the exam without time pressure. “The main point is for you to get feedback on what you just did, so that you can learn a lot,” he said. “So if you need two hours, take two hours. If you need an hour, take an hour. Students all said without exception, even those who did it quickly, they all said they really appreciated the fact that they weren’t stressed.” 

In other words, the untimed group exam improved the quality of the feedback that students received from each other. Deslauriers believes that the instant feedback that students are getting during the second stage is what makes the two-step exam so powerful. By reviewing the questions with their peers, they learn what they’ve gotten right and wrong and fix the wrong stuff. 

There’s also the added excitement of having to arrive at a consensus answer with peers. Deslauriers told me that he has seen otherwise quiet students getting into animated arguments, defending their approach to a problem. That combination of high student engagement with instant feedback seems to be particularly beneficial for learning.

I wondered about cheating and if students looked up answers online together. But Deslauriers said he didn’t detect cheating during the group portion of the exam at either campus. Students agree to honor codes at both schools and, perhaps, in the group setting, peers served as potential witnesses and discouraged bad behavior.

Deslauriers says there are far fewer group dynamic problems during collaborative exams than there are during typical classroom group work. “When you do active learning in the classroom, which I have a decade of experience doing, you can see there are free riders, people who just don’t contribute, and then you have to try to intervene and manage the groups,” he said. “It’s a big part [of teaching] to manage the groups to make sure they’re productive. Guess what, when you do the group exam, you don’t have to intervene with a single group. Does it still happen? I’m sure it does. But I would say 20 percent of what it was.” 

Deslauriers thinks the high stakes motivate students to participate. The group stage is worth 20 percent of the midterm exam grade in his classes. Once, when he set the stakes too low, students didn’t care or work hard enough on it. But he says stakes that are too high also stifle collaboration. “It’s important to get that right,” Deslauriers said. “It’s possible with a different student population that you might want to do 40 percent.”

Designing an exam at just the right level of difficulty, neither too hard nor too easy, is important too. When teachers make the quiz too easy, he says, there’s nothing for the kids to discuss. “It completely kills the productiveness of the collaboration,” he said. “I’ve seen [two-stage exams] done wrong very often, but when it’s done right, it’s active learning on steroids.”

This was a small experiment involving 330 students at two colleges and needs to be replicated. But if you are wondering how remote learning, with all of its frustrating disappointments, might change education, the answer could be a bunch of small technological innovations that teachers figured out on the fly. 

This story about two-stage exams was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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One of the hallmarks of so-called “progressive” schools is freedom for students to talk to each other in class. Students aren’t required to sit quietly all day, obediently listening to a teacher lecture or silently completing an assignment on their own. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose theories of child development inspire many teachers today, thought peer interaction was important both for a child’s social development and for learning itself. Piaget believed that children were passive recipients of knowledge when instructed by adults. But he noticed that when a child was asking questions and arguing with a fellow student, the child became an active, engaged learner. It’s that active engagement that leads to learning, Piaget theorized.

Yet when teachers open the classroom to group work and children’s chatter, peer learning can seem like a waste of time. Students often veer off-task, talking about Fortnite or Lizzo. Noise levels rise. Conflicts erupt. Are they really learning? Whether it’s productive to allot precious classroom minutes for children to talk with each other remains a debate with practical consequences.

A team of U.K. researchers collected all the studies they could find on peer interaction, in which children are either discussing or collaborating on an assignment together in small groups of two, three or four students. They found 71 studies, covering more than 7,000 children and teens. Most of the studies took place in the United States and the United Kingdom.  The results: Piaget was partly right … and wrong. Students tend to learn better by interacting with each other rather than wrestling with an assignment or a new topic on their own. But interacting with an adult one-to-one is even better than peer-to-peer interaction.

“That’s great, but how many times can a teacher work one on one with a child?” said Harriet Tenenbaum, an expert in learning at the University of Surrey and one of the study’s authors. “Group work should not be seen as a waste of time. There’s something about conversation that helps people learn. Doing problems on your own isn’t as beneficial. ”

Tenenbaum and her co-authors found that peer interaction helped children at all ages, from the youngest four-year-olds to the oldest 18-year-olds in the studies. Groups of three or four students were as productive as pairs of two, though most of the studies had children working in pairs. For studies that noted gender, boys and girls equally benefited from working in pairs or groups regardless if they worked together or apart. The study, “How effective is peer interaction in facilitating learning? A meta-analysis,” was published online December 2019 in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Students didn’t always learn more from interacting with each other than working alone in the 71 underlying studies. The ones that produced the strongest learning gains for peer interaction were those where adults gave children clear instructions for what do during their conversations. Explicit instructions to “arrive at a consensus” or “make sure you understand your partner’s perspective” helped children learn more. Simply telling students to “work together” or “discuss”  often didn’t generate learning improvements for students in the studies. That’s because students often repeat what they already believe in an unstructured conversation. The instructions force children to debate and negotiate, during which they can clear up misunderstandings and deepen their knowledge.

Related: A study finds promise in project-based learning for young low-income children

“Instructions are really important,” said Tenenbaum. In other words, the trendy direction to “turn and talk to your neighbor” isn’t sufficient.

Unfortunately, this meta-analysis didn’t shed light on so many questions I have about peer dynamics and learning. Do kids still learn well from peers when one student is dominating the conversation or when a partner is slacking off and forcing you to do all the work? These studies didn’t document behaviors during a conversation. Can you learn as much from a bright peer as a struggling learner?  Too few of the studies noted students’ prior achievement levels to compare that with how much they learned during the exercise.

I was especially disappointed that there wasn’t much insight into when a peer-to-peer discussion is most productive during a lesson. These underlying studies didn’t take place in real classrooms but in controlled laboratory conditions. Generally students came to a room and were tested to see what they already knew about a topic. Then some students were randomly assigned to work in pairs or group on that same topic. Students assigned to comparison control groups did different things depending on the study:  toiling on their own, working with an adult or even doing nothing. Then everyone was tested at the end of the exercise to see how much they learned. Learning gains were measured by comparing before and after tests.

Tenenbaum’s advice isn’t to get rid of traditional instruction but to use peer discussions to reinforce a lecture. She recommends that teachers continue to teach a lesson to the whole class, as usual, and then break the students up and have them work with a peer for five to 10 minutes to reinforce the concept. “I wouldn’t say to five-year-olds, ‘work with peers all day long,’” she said. Keeping the peer-to-peer sessions short might also help keep children and adolescents on topic.

But the science doesn’t yet prove this advice is sound. “The next step is to test this in real classrooms,” said Tenenbaum, suggesting that a teacher could give a half-hour lesson and then researchers could split the kids up into working in groups or alone and see who does better. “But it’s really hard for researchers to get into classrooms,” said Tenenbaum. “For schools, it’s disruptive.” Much like talking in class.

This story about peer interaction was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Critical thinking is all the rage in education. Schools brag that they teach it on their websites and in open houses to impress parents. Some argue that critical thinking should be the primary purpose of education and one of the most important skills to have in the 21st century, with advanced machines and algorithms replacing manual and repetitive labor.

But a fascinating review of the scientific research on how to teach critical thinking concludes that teaching generic critical thinking skills, such as logical reasoning, might be a big waste of time. Critical thinking exercises and games haven’t produced long-lasting improvements for students. And the research literature shows that it’s very difficult for students to apply critical thinking skills learned in one subject to another, even between different fields of science.

“Wanting students to be able to ‘analyse, synthesise and evaluate’ information sounds like a reasonable goal,” writes Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “But analysis, synthesis, and evaluation mean different things in different disciplines.”

Willingham’s reading of the research literature concludes that scientists are united in their belief that content knowledge is crucial to effective critical thinking. And he argues that the best approach is to explicitly teach very specific small skills of analysis for each subject. For example, in history, students need to interpret documents in light of their sources, seek corroboration and put them in their historical context. That kind of analysis isn’t relevant in science, where the source of a document isn’t as important as following the scientific method.

Willingham wrote a paper, “How to Teach Critical Thinking,” in May 2019 for the Department of Education of New South Wales in Australia. But it is entirely applicable to the American context.

In the paper, Willingham traces the history of teaching critical thinking. More than a century ago, many thought that difficult subjects like Latin might improve thinking abilities. But scientists subsequently found that students who studied Latin didn’t do any better on tests than those who didn’t. There are mixed results from more recent studies in teaching students computer science. A 2018 meta-analysis showed better creative thinking, mathematics, meta-cognition, spatial skills and reasoning for students who take computer programing. But the gains were much smaller  for studies with good control groups. A lot of the so-called benefit to studying computer science appears to be a placebo effect.

Related: Gifted classes may not help talented students move ahead faster

To be sure, there are basic logic principles that are true across subjects, such as understanding that “A” and “not A” cannot simultaneously be true. But students typically fail to apply even generic principles like these in new situations. In one experiment described by Willingham, people read a passage about how rebels successfully attacked a dictator hiding in a fortress (they dispersed the forces to avoid collateral damage and then converged at the point of attack). Immediately afterwards, they were asked how to destroy a malignant tumor using a ray that could cause a lot of collateral damage to healthy tissue. The solution was identical to that of the military attack but the subjects in the experiment didn’t see the analogy. In a follow-up experiment, people were told that the military story might help them solve the cancer problem and almost everyone solved it. “Using the analogy was not hard; the problem was thinking to use it in the first place,” Willingham explained.

To help student see analogies, “show students two solved problems with different surface structures but the same deep structure and ask them to compare them,” Williingham advises teachers, citing a pedagogical technique proven to work by researchers in 2013.

In math, students often get derailed when a word problem is slightly different from a step-by-step model that they’ve studied. A research-tested strategy here, developed by Richard Catrambone at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is to label the sub-steps of the solution with the goal they serve. That way students can understand why they’re using each step and what it’s accomplishing.

But the bigger problem is that critical thinking varies so much. “Critical thinking is needed when playing chess, designing a product, or planning strategy for a field hockey match,” Willingham wrote. “But there are no routine, reusable solutions for these problems.”

And this is where content knowledge becomes important. In order to compare and contrast, the brain has to hold ideas in working memory, which can easily be overloaded. The more familiar a student is with a particular topic, the easier it is for the student to hold those ideas in his working memory and really think. Willingham uses chess as a good example. Once a student has a played a lot of chess, then he has many board positions memorized in his brain and can sort through which one is better in each particular circumstance.

Related: A study finds promise in project-based learning for young low-income children

Willingham says that the scientific research shows that it’s very hard to evaluate an author’s claim if you don’t have background knowledge in the subject. “If you lack background knowledge about the topic, ample evidence from the last 40 years indicates you will not comprehend the author’s claims in the first place,” wrote Willingham, citing his own 2017 book.

At what age should teachers begin this subject-specific teaching of individual, discrete critical thinking skills? Some teachers might think it’s developmentally inappropriate, and possibly harmful, to engage in cognitive work that seems more appropriate for an older child. But research from the last 30 years shows that young children are far more capable in engaging in reasoning that we once thought. Scientists now think that cognitive development is more gradual and starts young. “In some circumstances, even toddlers can understand principles of conditional reasoning, and in other circumstances, conditional reasoning confuses adult physicians,” wrote Willingham. “It all depends on the content of the problem.”

Willingham’s ideas are similar to those of Natalie Wexler, who makes an impassioned argument that schools should return to a content-rich curriculum in her 2019 book, “The Knowledge Gap.” Both are worth reading as a strong counterpoint to the emphasis on critical thinking in schools today.

This story about how to teach critical thinking was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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