Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
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British Columbia, what are you thinking?

9/26/2012

 
The British Columbia education system would seem to be doing an excellent job.

Although very recent data are not available, performance by BC 15 year-olds on the 2006 PISA showed them lagging just one country in science (Finland), two countries in reading (Finland and Korea), and five in math (Taipei, Finland, Hong Kong, Korea, and fellow Canadian Province Quebec).

Meanwhile, in 2007, no one scored better than BC fourth graders on the PIRLS reading assessment. (Eight countries or provinces scored about the same--36 scored lower. Test data summarized here.)

Despite this record of success, BC is not satisfied, and gearing up to change the curriculum.

There's one sense in which this plan is clearly needed: there are too many objectives. The document describing learning objectives for the fourth grade runs 21 pages, and includes scores of items. No one can cover all that in a year, so the document ought to be tightened.

Another stated objective in the document describing the proposed change is to offer teachers more flexibility so that they can better tune education to individual students.

Whether that's a good idea is, in my view, a judgment call. The BC Ministry of Education contends that the current curriculum is too proscriptive. It may be, but it's being taught (and learned) at very high levels of proficiency, at least as measured by international comparison tests that most observers think are pretty reasonable. Change the curriculum, and that level of performance will likely drop.

But other benefits may accrue, such as better performance in academic areas not measured by students with strong interest in those areas, and greater student satisfaction.

My real concern is that the plan doesn't make very clear what the expected benefit is, nor how we'll know it when we see it.

At least in the overview document, the benefit is described as "increased opportunities to gain the essential learning and life skills necessary to live and work successfully in a complex, interconnected, and rapidly changing world. Students will focus on acquiring skills to help them use knowledge critically and creatively, to solve problems ethically and collaboratively, and to make the decisions necessary to succeed in our increasingly globalized world."

Oddly enough, I thought that excellent preparation in Reading, Math, and Science was just the ticket to help you use knowledge critically and creatively. And then I saw this statement:

"In today’s technology-enabled world, students have virtually instant access to a limitless amount of information. The greater value of education for every student is not in learning the information but in learning the skills they need to successfully find, consume, think about and apply it in their lives."
Picture
This is the language of the 21st century skills movement, about which I've written in several places: about the flawed assumptions that underlie plausible-sounding plans, and about the difficulty in implementing them. Don Hirsch has a great piece on the idea that you can always just look stuff up.

If you live in BC, pay attention. This will not end well.
Scott McLeod link
9/26/2012 02:27:26 pm

Hi Dan,

In potential defense of the '21st century skills movement' - and without diminishing in any way the need for students to know stuff - do you not see the need for greater attention to so-called 'higher order thinking skills?' Not to the exclusion of facts and content, but more a recognition that our traditional emphasis on ONLY facts and content (except for a few elite students) is insufficient in today's times. From employers to colleges to educators to policymakers, almost everyone seems to recognize that students, graduates, and workers need greater exposure to things you regularly mock? I'm trying to resolve the widespread call for greater attention to skills and capacities that fall in the upper levels of Bloom's or Webb's taxonomies with my respect for your work and your ridicule of such claims...

Donna Campbell
9/26/2012 08:14:14 pm

The National Research Council published in July 2012 its study of 21st century learning skills. The report, I think, makes clear why the skills must be embedded in content. Both are necessary and inextricably bound.

Dan Willingham
9/27/2012 04:14:31 am

@Scott In the blogosphere I hear both complaints: that American education is focused completely on facts and skills (folks point to testing) and that American education is focused to much on *process* (people point to students generally mediocre performance on these factual tests, and to some widely-used programs that go light on facts--seen Robert Pondiscio's piece on the Atlantic website?)

I think there's some truth in both positions. The pressure created by testing has prompted some teachers (and schools, and districts) to focus on facts in a way that doesn't work--facts are out of context and are not learned in the context of thinking skills. And yes, you find classrooms, schools, and districts where factual knowledge is an afterthought.

None of that is the point of this blog. I was responding to the fact that BC would seem be enjoying pretty fair success. PISA in particular is characterized as a problem-solving test, offering "real world" problems. BC's roadmap to even greater heights is (it seems) less emphasis on factual knowledge so that they can learn better how to access and evaluate information (the second quote in purple.) I argue that the best way to teach kids how to evaluate knowledge is in the context of knowing something about the topic, and that the promise of teaching kids "information skills" in the abstract will be mostly ineffective.

Scott McLeod link
9/27/2012 11:05:21 am

Thanks for the clarification, Dan. I thought you were more balanced in your thinking about this stuff but your original post didn't bring that out like this comment did. Much appreciated!

EB
9/28/2012 04:30:14 am

Part of the issue is that adept use of technology does not necessarily equate to, or even help with, critical thinking skills, yet many 21st Century learning advocates seem to assume that it does. It is hard to find any description of validated curricula that do result in improvements in critical thinking (and I would add that through all of history, children do seem to have improved their critical thinking skills w/o any particular attention to those skills as a stand-alone goal). Scott, are you aware of any such curricula?

Scott McLeod link
9/30/2012 01:09:42 am

Hi EB,

While I think there is some research showing that 'critical thinking' can be taught as a separate skill that cuts across domains, I think the vast majority of research indicates that critical thinking is best taught within domain-specific contexts. Dan would know this literature better than I do.

I agree with you that dropping technology into the learning-teaching equation doesn't necessarily result in the occurrence of higher-order thinking skills. That said, digital technologies are amplifiers of what we do - they increase the scale, scope, reach, power, etc. of our knowledge work. So, when used well, amazing things can happen that simply cannot in purely analog environments.


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    The goal of this blog is to provide pointers to scientific findings that are applicable to education that I think ought to receive more attention.

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