Seminar: the 2006/2007 constructivist academic flame war; Sunday, August 27 @ 1PM PDT

With the LLM genie out of the bottle, I've found myself often drawn into conversations about The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer and similar dreams of futuristic learning environments which emphasize inquiry-based learning, exploratory learning, problem-based learning, curiosity-driven learning, and so on.

These conversations have naturally led me back to a famously controversial paper: "Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching", by psychologists Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (KSC).

The authors argue that all this talk about inquiry and discovery learning is nice, but the actual empirical record looks surprisingly poor, and there are some fundamental conflicts with our mechanical understanding of cognition.

I’m instinctively quite sympathetic to those schools of pedagogy, so I found this paper quite stimulating. It provoked many opposing responses; I’ll index a few highlights:

• Hmelo-Silver et al and Schmidt et al accept KSC’s premises but argue that their preferred inquiry-based method actually does have subtle guidance.
• Kuhn makes the more interesting argument that content knowledge is less important than values, attitudes, meta-skills, etc.
• KSC published a response to these three papers and maintained their positions.
• Schwartz et al argue that we’re testing the wrong thing; constructivism performs better if you ask which method prepares the learner for learning from new experiences in the future; KSC reply (included in the paper) suggesting adversarial collaboration (but they never do it).

Join me (via Google Meet) on Sunday, August 27 at 1PM PDT [GCal] for a discussion of these issues. Please read at least the original KSC paper; I’d suggest picking at least one follow-up that interests you to hear “the other side” too. Bring your noticings, wonderings, and ideas; I'll bring discussion questions.

I'll record our discussion and share it here afterward.