Powerful Learning

What We Know About Teaching for Understanding

Linda Darling-Hammond, Brigid Barron, P. David Pearson, Alan H. Schoenfeld, Elizabeth K. Stage, Timothy D. Zimmerman, Gina N. Cervetti, Jennifer L. Tilson

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781119181767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos de enseñanza de la educación

In Powerful Learning, Linda Darling-Hammond and an impressive list of co-authors offer a clear, comprehensive, and engaging exploration of the most effective classroom practices. They review, in practical terms, teaching strategies that generate meaningful K–2 student understanding, and occur both within the classroom walls and beyond. The book includes rich stories, as well as online videos of innovative classrooms and schools, that show how students who are taught well are able to think critically, employ flexible problem-solving, andapply learned skills and knowledgeto new situations.

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HOW CAN WE TEACH FOR MEANINGFUL LEARNING?

Brigid Barron and Linda Darling-Hammond

THE NEED FOR INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING TO SUPPORT TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SKILLS

Enthusiasm for approaches to instruction that connect knowledge to the contexts in which it will be applied has been on the upswing since the 1980s. Recommendations from an array of organizations have emphasized the need to support twenty-first-century skills through learning that supports inquiry, application, production, and problem solving. More than a decade ago, the SCANS Report (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991) suggested that for today’s students to be prepared for tomorrow’s workplace they need learning environments that allow them to explore real-life situations and consequential problems. These arguments have been echoed in scholarly research (for example, Levy & Murnane, 2004), national commission reports (such as NCTM, 1989; MLSC et al., 1996), and policy proposals (see NCREL EnGauge, 2003; Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2002), urging instructional reforms to help students gain vital media literacies, critical thinking skills, systems thinking, and interpersonal and self-directional skills that allow them to manage projects and competently find resources and use tools.

For these capacities to be nurtured, the reports argue, students must be given opportunities to develop them in the context of complex, meaningful projects that require sustained engagement, collaboration, research, management of resources, and development of an ambitious performance or product. The rationale for these recommendations has come in part from research demonstrating that students do not routinely develop the ability to analyze, think critically, write and speak effectively, or solve complex problems from working on constrained tasks that emphasize memorization and elicit responses that merely demonstrate recall or application of simple algorithms (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Bransford & Donovan, 2005). In addition, there is a growing body of research indicating that students learn more deeply and perform better on complex tasks if they have the opportunity to engage in more “authentic” learning.

A set of studies have found positive effects on student learning of instruction, curriculum, and assessment practices that require students to construct and organize knowledge, consider alternatives, apply disciplinary processes to content central to the discipline (such as use of scientific inquiry, historical research, literary analysis, or the writing process), and communicate effectively to audiences beyond the classroom and school (Newmann, 1996). For example, a study of more than twenty-one hundred students in twenty-three restructured schools found significantly higher achievement on intellectually challenging performance tasks for students who experienced this kind of “authentic pedagogy” (Newmann, Marks, & Gamoran, 1995). The use of these practices predicted student performance more strongly than any other variable, including student background factors and prior achievement.

This is promising, but the checkered history of efforts to implement “learning by doing” makes clear the need for greater knowledge about how to successfully manage problemand project-based approaches in the classroom (Barron et al., 1998). The kind of teaching suggested by these descriptions is not straightforward and requires knowledge of the characteristics of successful strategies and highly skilled teachers to implement them. In this chapter, we focus on the design and implementation of inquiry-based curriculum that engages children in extended constructive work, often in collaborative groups, and subsequently demands a good deal of self-regulated inquiry.

INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING

The family of approaches that can be described as inquiry-based includes project-based learning, design-based learning, and problem-based learning.

The research we review spans the K–12 years, college, and graduate education and can be found across core disciplines and in interdisciplinary programs of study¹. Two major conclusions emerge:

Small group inquiry approaches can be extremely powerful for learning. To be effective, they need to be guided by thoughtful curriculum with clearly defined learning goals, well-designed scaffolds, ongoing assessment, and rich informational resources. Opportunities for professional development that include a focus on assessing student work increase the likelihood that teachers will develop expertise in implementing these approaches.

Assessment design is critical. Designing good assessment is an important issue for revealing the benefits of inquiry approaches as well as for promoting the success of learning. Specifically, if one looks only at traditional learning outcomes, such as memorization of information or responses to multiple-choice questions, inquiry-based and traditional methods of instruction appear to yield similar results. Benefits for inquiry learning emerge when the assessments require application of knowledge and measure quality of reasoning. Consequently, we also take up a discussion of performance assessment and its role in both supporting and evaluating meaningful learning.

Our discussion within this chapter is organized into four sections.

First, we provide a historical perspective on inquiry-based learning in the context of the ongoing calls to develop inquiry and collaborative capacities in learners.

Next, we summarize research on collaborative small group learning. Our review focuses primarily on studies that offer data on the outcomes of cooperative or collaborative learning approaches. However, we also look at the kinds of interaction between children that lead to deeper learning and better group problem solving, and what we have learned about how teachers can support productive interactions.

In the third section, we summarize what we know about the forms of inquiry-based approaches (project, design, and problem-based) with respect to learning outcomes, supportive activity structures, and classroom norms.

Finally, we close with common design principles and recommendations about approaches to assessment.

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON INQUIRY-BASED LEARNING

Projects as a means for making schooling more useful and readily applied to the world first became popular in the early part of the twentieth century in the United States. The term project represented a broad class of learning experiences. In early works one sees the label applied to activities as diverse as making a dress, watching a spider spin a web, and writing a letter. The key idea behind such projects was that learning was strengthened when “whole heartedness of purpose was present” (Kilpatrick, 1918).

Enthusiasm and belief in the efficacy of such approaches for schoolaged children has waxed and waned, with project-based learning having been rejected as too unstructured during several eras of “back to the basics” backlash, or policymakers having argued that applied projects are only needed for vocational training. Critics of the progressive movement held that discovery learning approaches led to “doing for the sake of doing” rather than doing for the sake of learning. There is a growing consensus that authentic problems and projects afford unique opportunities for learning, but that authenticity in and of itself does not guarantee learning (Barron et al., 1998; Thomas, 2000).

The key is how these complex approaches are implemented. For example, in the curricular reforms of the post-Sputnik years, initiatives using inquiry-based approaches (typically called “discovery learning” or project learning) were found to produce comparable achievement on basic skills tests while contributing more to students’ problem-solving abilities, curiosity, creativity, independence, and positive feelings about school (Dunkin & Biddle, 1974; Glass et al., 1977; Good & Brophy, 1986; Horwitz, 1979; McKeachie & Kulik, 1975; Peterson, 1979; Resnick, 1987; Soar, 1977). This kind of meaning-oriented teaching, once thought to be appropriate only for selected high-achieving students, proved to be more effective than rote teaching for students across a spectrum of initial achievement levels, family income, and cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Braddock & McPartland, 1993; Garcia, 1993; Knapp et al., 1995).

However, new curriculum initiatives focused on inquiry using complex instructional strategies were found more often to promote a significant increase in learning gains among students taught by the early adopters—teachers who were extensively involved in designing and piloting the curriculum and who were given strong professional development. These effects were not always sustained as curriculum reforms were “scaled up” and used by teachers who did not have the same degree of understanding or skill in implementation.

At the present time, there is still controversy over whether inquiry-oriented approaches are effective and efficient for developing the student’s basic knowledge of a domain. Implementation issues continue to be a concern for both practitioners and researchers and complicate research. Examples include studies that have suggested that “direct instruction”—usually understood as traditional lecture-based approaches—is preferable to “discovery learning.” The sources of confusion are shown in a study by Klahr and Nigam (2004), which taught middle school students to set up controlled experiments and then measured the students’ knowledge of experimental design and their ability to set up experiments that could appropriately control for potentially confounding variables. They labeled their conditions “direct instruction” and “discovery learning.” However, both conditions included features of discovery learning, including the chance for students to explore the materials and try together to set up experiments. In their discovery learning condition, the researchers simply instructed the participating sixth graders to design experiments to evaluate variables related to the speed of a ball traveling down a ramp. In the direct instruction approach, the children were taught about the importance of not confounding variables in the context of demonstration experiments. This lesson was given after they had tried to set up experiments on their own.

Although the researchers’ conclusions suggested that the direct-instruction approach yielded better learning, they failed to acknowledge that this approach included both a great deal of experimentation and some direct instruction. In addition, critics of the study’s conclusion point out that in a real classroom situation children would be given much more guidance and scaffolding than took place in their discovery-learning condition. Thus the study does not prove that classroom-based inquiry approaches are do not work but only that they are more successful when combined with necessary instruction. This combination of appropriately timed direct instruction with the results of inquiry has also been found in other studies to be superior to either approach alone (see, for example, Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999, box on p. 46). We return to this important principle later in the chapter.

Classroom research does indicate that well-designed, carefully thought-out materials and connected classroom practices are needed to capitalize on inquiry-based approaches. Without careful planning, students may miss opportunities to connect their project work with key concepts underlying a discipline. For example, Roth (2006) found that in an engineering-based curriculum for elementary school students engineering principles were unlikely to be discovered simply by successfully engineering solutions to problems such as building bridges or towers. Similarly, Petrosino (1998) described his observation of students building rockets in a science curriculum highlighting interesting products and a high level of engagement but no growth in learning ...