1967-1977 largest educational research project in U.S. -Results were buried.

We call all remember the stuff we had to recite over and over again. Things that were drilled into us at an early age. I wish they would do more of this in school.

Wow, that’s K-9 for me.

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We call all remember the stuff we had to recite over and over again. Things that were drilled into us at an early age. I wish they would do more of this in school.

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Grammar - logic - rhetoric

It’s not sexy, but it works. And those old, dead whites guys who started it are racists.

Ergo, we must surrender kids to a lifetime of illiteracy and incompetence to justify our pet theories.

We would be better off giving teachers a McGuffey reader and nothing else than we are now.

Key element in that thread is that it points out drilling facts was shown to be a good thing.

Easily the dumbest thing I've heard REPEATEDLY from teachers is that somehow, drilling facts isn't an educational positive. This come from just absolutely simplistic all or nothing thinking.

It's resulted in 6th graders who haven't mastered their multiplication tables and myriad other silly deficiencies.

Drilling facts is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to education. Teachers act like people who say this ONLY want to drill facts. But that's dumb. What we are saying is that it lays the foundation to do all the other stuff teachers just want to fricking skip straight to.

To use sports as an analogy. Teachers basically want to coach baseball by skipping batting practice, hundreds of grounders and hundreds of fly balls and going straight to how to turn a double play.

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Drilling facts is ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to education.

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Repetition
Repetition
Repetition

It worked for elementary school and med school

It works.

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Repetition Repetition Repetition It worked for elementary school and med school It works.

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Exactly.

Because when you get to the complicated shite where repetition isn't as applicable, you don't want the person still unable to INSTANTLY call up relevant facts to the more complicated situation.

The last think you want when teaching even something like Geometry is for the kids to still require anything but instant recall for something like 7x9=

The fact that direct instruction was the most effective isn’t s shock at all if you understand basic human behavior and development.

Direct instruction will bring the overall level of education up, because it allows for all levels of student to have a base of knowledge. Where it is not effective is once that base of knowledge is achieved, particularly for those students who have a higher altitude.

Those students will become stagnated unless provided an opportunity to develop analytical and critical thinking skills, something direct instruction simply cannot do.

Many people don’t like to hear this and simply can’t come to terms with it, but some students are more capable than others. Because of our current approach, we’ve done a poor job of achieving that bass level of knowledge, and a poor job developing our more apt students too.

This is where we’ve failed. Yes, other approaches to learning are far more effective at developing a higher degree of understanding and learning, but not every student has that ability. For those that do not, they never even achieve that base. Their inability and eventual frustration leads to those that can benefit from other modes to be hindered.

The simple answer is direct instruction should be the foundation, and a highly developed gifted program should be designed for those student that require additional stimulation.

This is like a stick into the eye to many educators and may be viewed as unfair, but life is unfair. We need to serve all of our students the way they need to be served. That will allow all of us to be more successful.

That thread does a really poor job of explaining what Direct Instruction is, and contrasting it with the models of education that existed, as nearly all Americans go through a model influenced by John Dewey. I'm extremely skeptical that anyone has experienced Direct Instruction education in a classroom environment, as it has never been widespread to my knowledge.

The tradition of learning grammar and rhetoric falls under the Classical Education model, while other models include Essentialism, Critical Pedagogy, Democratic Education, and Progressivism, among many other variants. Direct Instruction could be theoretically used in every model, as it is a method of teaching, not a distinct model unto itself. It requires extremely well-trained teachers, and can easily be used in every classroom form, from workshops to seminars to traditional classrooms.

The tradition of rote memorization isn't limited to Direct Instruction, but rather is a feature of Classical Education. I did my own version of the "Great Books" curriculum, which is based on the Classical Education model, which has had some superb results for myself, and I plan to instill that curriculum in my children.

But there is significant value in the "student-centered" learning models. Something like painting imparts motor development, and interests can be discovered and honed from the development of motor skills. There is no biological basis for separating motor skills from other skills, as the brain serves perpetually as an integrative organ, and the same ideas behind early education in sports (such as in baseball and soccer) also apply to every educational field. The Suzuki method has been particularly successful in training musical prodigies.

The essential problem is that individual approaches to education sometimes clash with the need to educate a large group of people. There hasn't been a model that captures how to successfully nurture interests and talents of individual students with the interests of the class as a whole.

In medical school, I thought that my strong memory and recall of details would aid me in remembering lists of diseases and medications, but I found that I had far better recall when I understood the context and concepts completely, and could place medications and disease processes into that framework, rather than relying on memorization alone. Spaced recognition and scaffolding, the latter which is a feature of nearly every educational model (as in the repeat of previous details with added layers of complexity) were more important in recall than memorization skill alone.

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Interesting. Isn’t that how the Chinese and other Asian countries teach?

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I'm pretty sure it is.

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Eh. There’s a portion of the class that won’t learn. Not because of a failure of the model. But rather because they’re low IQ.

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The fact that they are in the same class as children who are further along indicates a failure. The Progressive model suggest peer teaching can mitigate some of these effects, but in my experience, it tends to help the one doing the teaching.

IQ scores for children can vary from year to year, as Hutchens and others point out. IQ is also highly mediated by nutritional factors, as the addition of an iodine rich diet saw an increase of IQ by one SD in a Chinese meta-study of 37,000 children. A new paper showed that air filters installed in the A/C lead to an increase in math and English scores. I'm finding little physiological justification to keep intelligence distinct from motor function generally, as again the brain is an integration center. I'm just getting into cognitive science, so this view can change.

There are so many factors that could lead to decreased performance, from genetic to post-transcriptional to environmental, that writing off a portion of kids by virtue of their supposed IQ scores is not a sustainable approach, especially if viewed through a geopolitical angle.

The things that American education does extremely well is support creativity and outside-the-box thinking, which is an area where China, for example, is trying to catch up by changing its educational model. There are some in the CCP that blame the education model for the countries inability to produce a fifth-generation fighter, among other technological advancements.