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Journal of Science Education and Technology

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19-07-2017

Invention Versus Direct Instruction: For Some Content, It’s a Tie

Authors: Catherine C. Chase, David Klahr

Published in: Journal of Science Education and Technology | Issue 6/2017

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Abstract

An important, but as yet unresolved pedagogical question is whether discovery-oriented or direct instruction methods lead to greater learning and transfer. We address this issue in a study with 101 fourth and fifth grade students that contrasts two distinct instructional methods. One is a blend of discovery and direct instruction called Invent-then-Tell (IT), and the other is a version of direct instruction called Tell-then-Practice (TP). The relative effectiveness of these methods is compared in the context of learning a critical inquiry skill—the control-of-variables strategy. Previous research has demonstrated the success of IT over TP for teaching deep domain structures, while other research has demonstrated the superiority of direct instruction for teaching simple experimental design, a domain-general inquiry skill. In the present study, students in both conditions made equally large gains on an immediate assessment of their application and conceptual understanding of experimental design, and they also performed similarly on a test of far transfer. These results were fairly consistent across school populations with various levels of prior achievement and socioeconomic status. Findings suggest that broad claims about the relative effectiveness of these two distinct methods should be conditionalized by particular instructional contexts, such as the type of knowledge being taught.

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Students worked in pairs because collaboration is a typical component of invention and similar forms of instruction (Kapur and Bielaczyc 2012; Schwartz et al. 2011; Schwartz and Martin 2004). In the few cases when there was an odd number of students in a class, the “odd student out” either worked alone or in a group of three.

Because the timing of each instructional component differed by condition, the timing of the second CVS skills test also differed by condition, as shown in fig. 1.

Given the small number of schools in this study, it was inappropriate to conduct hierarchical analyses, which require larger sample sizes to reach unbiased estimates of each factor (Maas and Hox 2005).

The same analyses were conducted in a repeated measures model, and the findings were the same.

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Title: Invention Versus Direct Instruction: For Some Content, It’s a Tie
Authors: Catherine C. Chase
David Klahr
Publication date: 19-07-2017
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Journal of Science Education and Technology / Issue 6/2017
Print ISSN: 1059-0145
Electronic ISSN: 1573-1839
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-017-9700-6

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