He, M October 13, 2010 Volume 13 Number 13 ISSN 1094-5296 Coming Up for Air: But Is It Oxygen or Phlogiston? A Response to Taber‟s Review of Constructivist Instruction: Success Or Failure? David Klahr Carnegie Mellon University Citation: Klahr, David (2010 October 13) Coming Up for Air: But is it Oxygen or Phlogiston? A Response to Taber‟s Review of Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? Education Review, 13(13). Retrieved [Date] from http://www.edrev.info/essays/v13n13.pdf Keith Taber's lucid review (Taber, 2010) of the Tobias & Duffy (2009) book presents an articulate contrast to the typically contentious and unjoined debates about pro- and anti- constructivist approaches to education. Indeed the clarity of Taber‟s summary of those approaches highlights some specific issues about which I offer a few points of disagreement in what I hope is the same spirit of constructive (but not constructivist!) criticism. When Theories Compete, There Is Ultimately a Winner The first such point is Taber's analogy between the incommensurability of the two different "paradigms" represented by the “instructivist” and the “constructivist” camps and earlier scientific controversies. He cites the 17th century debates between phlogiston believers vs. oxygen believers as one example, and the earlier debates between heliocentric believers vs. geocentric believers as another. But in each case, there is more than a world view involved: one theory really does describe education review // reseñas educativas editors: gene v glass gustavo e. fischman melissa cast-brede a multi-lingual journal of book reviews Education Review http://www.edrev.info 2 the natural world substantially better than the other. No scientist today believes in either phlogiston or a geocentric universe because the empirical evidence overwhelmingly refutes those theories in favor of their alternatives: the oxygen theory and the heliocentric theory. Thus, if Taber's analogy to pro- and anti- constructivism is appropriate, at some point one of these views will simply disappear from serious scientific discourse (and it is clear where my bets lie). However my analogy is incomplete, because a major difference between the examples from chemistry and physics and the current debate between instructional-isms is the dearth of operational definitions. Operational Definitions Are Crucial And that is my second point: the importance – but disconcerting absence from these debates -- of clear descriptions of what is actually going on in the instructional situations under investigation. As I have argued elsewhere (Klahr & Li, 2005) it is surprising and distressing that when education researchers and science educators join in heated debates about 'discovery learning', 'direct instruction', 'inquiry', 'hands-on', or 'minds-on', they often abandon one of the foundations of modern scientific discourse - the operational definition. However, no science can advance without unambiguous, operationally defined, and replicable procedures and measurements. Take, for example, Taber's discussion of the various nuances of bullying. While in everyday usage “bullying” is an extremely vague and subjective term, a researcher can describe a clear set of indices for it. These can range from observations of behavior, to questionnaires, to teacher ratings, to descriptions of contextual features, to physiological and psychological measures of its extent and effects. Researchers will certainly have different opinions about which measures "really" define bullying, but if operational definitions are used, there will be little ambiguity in any particular study about what is being characterized as bullying behavior and its effects. Consequently, over time, evidence will accumulate that is consistent, or inconsistent with one theory or another. Although Taber acknowledges the importance of operationalization as "obvious" ("At one level, this is simply stating the obvious: we need to operationalize our research question, rather than just ask which arrangement is best."), he repeatedly lapses into a perspective that seems to argue that it is impossible to operationalize many questions and processes that are of importance to the constructivist "educational research paradigm". But as Mark Anthony put it in his soliloquy on Caesar's death, “If it were so, it were a grievous fault”, for it removes assessments of constructivism from the realm of scientific research. In the absence of clear operational definitions, replication, re-analysis, and application from research to practice are all severely limited, if not impossible, because without them, we quite literally don‟t know what we are talking about. And Taber does seem to believe in the impossibility of any empirical assessments of different approaches to instruction. For Education Review http://www.edrev.info 3 example, he favorably cites Jonassen‟s lament that “ .. high-quality research studies comparing the effectiveness of inquiry methods and direct instruction ... probably do not exist and cannot exist. Researchers examining the effectiveness of direct instruction begin with fundamentally different assumptions, evoke significantly different theory biases, and use different research methods than researchers examining informal or inquiry learning. Therefore the questions they ask, the learning outcomes they seek and the research tools and methods they use are also quite different.” (Jonassen, 2009, p. 29) This attitude toward our science is disastrous. The same lament about 18th century chemistry would, as I suggested earlier, leave us with a vibrant Phlogiston community in the 21st century! Multi-attribute Comparisons Are Possible Taber (p. 31) seems sympathetic to the constructivist plaint that comparisons between "instructionist" and "constructionist" approaches invariably and necessarily use a severely impoverished form of constructionist instruction because the very nature of empirical experimental comparisons necessitates varying only one potentially causal feature at a time. But this is simply not true. In the comparisons with which I am familiar the contrasting instructional approaches are combinations of features – vectors that include several contrasts that are characteristic of each approach (cf., Klahr & Nigam, 2004; Lorch, et al, 2010; Minner, Levy, & Century, 2010). And only the entire package–the vector of instructional components–can be assessed, not its individual features. At the fine-grained level, of course, such comparisons are confounded experiments, but at the aggregate level they are perfectly acceptable. They are analogous to comparisons between other types of complex multi-attribute artifacts, such as comparisons between two types of aircraft, or two types of web browsers, or two types of reading programs. It is certainly possible to compare two multi-attribute systems by using a similarly complex evaluation function. For example, fixed wing aircraft have a vector of performance measures that are consistently different than helicopters, and assessments such has these are done in a wide variety of domains. Constructivists cannot use complexity of treatments or assessments as an excuse to avoid rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of a instructional process. Taber argues that If we accept that {personal constructivist perspective} …, then a number of things follow. One … is that it is essential that teachers plan teaching based on accurate intelligence about students‟ current knowledge states – and so (on-going) diagnostic assessment becomes a very important part of teaching. Education Review http://www.edrev.info 4 However, the instructional approaches that provide the most careful, validated, individualized, and precisely targeted and direct instruction – cognitive tutors (Koedinger & Anderson, 1998; Koedinger, Anderson, Hadley, & Mark, 1997) –exemplify exactly the kind of instruction that “personal constructivists “ should value, even though they are clearly by-products of the “instructivist” camp. Who Really Cares About Transfer? My final point of disagreement with Taber is with respect to his apparent endorsement of the claim by Wise and O‟Neil that, when compared to “instructionists,” constructivists have “greater ambitions where transfer of learning is concerned.” This is patently false, as just about every “instructionist” study that I‟ve ever read (or written), puts a very heavy emphasis on both the theoretical and the empirical aspects of transfer. To give two specific examples from my own research, in Klahr & Nigam (2004), we studied the effects of highly focused training on simple experimental design on children‟s ability to evaluate the science fair posters of other children – a task quite “distant” from the initial instruction on several dimensions, and in Strand-Cary and Klahr (2008) we measured transfer of simple experimental design skills three years after training. (For a more general treatment of transfer, see Barnett & Ceci, 2002; Chen & Klahr, 2008.) Where is the evidence to support the claim of “greater ambitions” for transfer from constructivists? I believe that the burden of proof is on constructivists to define a set of instructional goals, an unambiguous description of instructional processes, a clear way to ensure implementation fidelity, and then to perform a rigorous assessment of effects: near transfer, intermediate transfer, far transfer, delayed transfer, robust transfer, “ preparation for future learning” (Schwartz, & Martin, 2004), or whatever. But they really need to “do the right thing” rather than wish away the need for principled and replicable empirical evaluations in a barrage of post-modern obfuscation. References Barnett, S. M., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 612–637. Dean, D., Jr., & Kuhn, D. (2007). Direct instruction vs. discovery: The long view. Science Education, 91, 384–397. Chen, Z. & Klahr, D., (2008) Remote Transfer of Scientific Reasoning and Problem-Solving Strategies in Children. In R. V. Kail (Ed.) Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 36. (pp. 419 – 470) Amsterdam: Elsevier Jonassen, D. (2009). Reconciling a human cognitive architecture. In S. Tobias & T. M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist Instruction: Success or failure? (pp. 13-33). NY: Routledge. Klahr, D. & Li, J. (2005) Cognitive Research and Elementary Science Instruction: From the Laboratory, to the Classroom, and Education Review http://www.edrev.info 5 Back. Journal of Science Education and Technology, 4, 217-238. Klahr, D. & Nigam, M. (2004) The equivalence of learning paths in early science instruction: effects of direct instruction and discovery learning. Psychological Science, 15, 661-667. Koedinger, K. R. & Anderson, J. R. (1998). Illustrating principled design: The early evolution of a cognitive tutor for algebra symbolization. Interactive Learning Environments, 5, 161-180. Koedinger, K. R., Anderson, J. R., Hadley, W. H., & Mark, M. A. (1997). Intelligent tutoring goes to school in the big city. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education, 8, 30-43. Kuhn, D., Black, J., Keselman, A., & Kaplan, D. (2000). The development of cognitive skills to support inquiry learning. Cognition and Instruction, 1 , 495–523. Lorch, R. F. Jr, Lorch, E. P., Calderhead, W. J., Dunlap, E. E., Hodell, E. C., & Freer, B. D. (2010) Learning the Control of Variables Strategy in Higher and Lower Achieving Classrooms: Contributions of Explicit Instruction and Experimentation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 90– 101. Minner, D. D.,Levy, A. J., Century, J. (2010) Inquiry-based science instruction. What is it and does it matter? Results from a research synthesis years 1984 to 2002. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 47, 474-496. Strand-Cary, M. & Klahr, D. (2008). Developing Elementary Science Skills: Instructional Effectiveness and Path Independence. Cognitive Development, 23, 488–511. Schwartz, D. L. & Martin, T. (2004) Inventing to Prepare for Future Learning: The Hidden Efficiency of Encouraging Original Student Production in Statistics Instruction. Cognition and Instruction, 22, 129-184 Taber, Keith S. (2010 July 6) Constructivism and Direct Instruction as Competing Instructional Paradigms: An Essay Review of Tobias and Duffy„s Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure? Education Review, 13(8). Retrieved Oct 1, 2010 from http://www.edrev.info/essays/v13n8inde x.html Tobias, S. and T. M. Duffy, T. M. (2009) Constructivist Theory Applied to Instruction: Success or Failure? NY: Routledge. Wise, A. F., & O'Neill, K. (2009). Beyond more versus less: a reframing of the debate on instructional guidance. In S. Tobias & T. M. Duffy (Eds.), Constructivist Instruction: Success or failure? (pp. 82-85). New York: Routledge. http://www.psy.cmu.edu/faculty/klahr/personal/pdf/Strand-Cary%20and%20Klahr%202008.pdf http://www.psy.cmu.edu/faculty/klahr/personal/pdf/Strand-Cary%20and%20Klahr%202008.pdf http://www.psy.cmu.edu/faculty/klahr/personal/pdf/Strand-Cary%20and%20Klahr%202008.pdf http://www.psy.cmu.edu/faculty/klahr/personal/pdf/Strand-Cary%20and%20Klahr%202008.pdf Education Review http://www.edrev.info 6 About the Reviewer David Klahr is the Walter van Dyke Bingham Professor of Cognitive Development and Education Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Director of CMU‟s Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research, and the Education Director of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center. He studies the cognitive processes that support children‟s understanding of science. His recent research focuses on the extent to which children learn more from highly directed, carefully scripted, instruction about scientific procedures, compared to more open-ended "discovery" methods of science instruction. As part of this project, he has been developing a computer-based "intelligent tutor" to teach children about the basics of experimental design. He has published over 100 journal articles and several books on children‟s thinking, problem solving, scientific reasoning and the relation between cognition and instruction. In recent years he has served on three different committees of the National Academy of Science: the Committee on the Foundations of Assessment, the Committee on Research in Education, and the Committee on Science Learning, Kindergarten through Eighth Grade. In 2007 he was elected to the National Academy of Education. Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review. http://www.edrev.info Editors Gene V Glass glass@edrev.info Gustavo Fischman fischman@edrev.info Melissa Cast-Brede cast-brede@edrev.info