Does Team Work Make the Dream Work? If the dream is for students to learn math, the answer is "no," write Andrew G. Biggs and John Mantus of the American Enterprise Institute. Traditional teacher-directed instruction is linked to higher math scores on the international PISA exam, student-oriented instruction with lower math scores.
They analyzed the 2012 PISA exam, which includes questions on how math is taught, as well as demographic information. That made it possible to control for socioeconomic status, family structure, use of the test language at home and immigrant status.
Comparing similar students, math instruction makes a meaningful difference in student learning, they conclude. Lower achievers were helped the most by teacher-directed instruction, but high achievers also did better.
Biggs provides details on what's most and least effective on Substack.
The definition of teacher-directed instruction was: The teacher sets clear learning goals, asks students to present their thinking or reasoning and asks questions to check understanding. At the start of a lesson, the teacher presents a short summary of the previous lesson.
In student-oriented instruction, "the teacher gives different work to classmates who have difficulties learning and/or to those who can advance faster," assigns complex projects, has students "work in small groups to come up with joint solutions to a problem or task" and asks students to help plan classroom activities.
"Among teacher-directed instructional practices, Checks Understanding, Encourages Thinking and Reasoning, and Informs about Learning Goals were associated with higher PISA math scores, in that order of importance," Biggs writes.
Among student-oriented teaching practices, the least-effective was having students plan classroom activities and the next worse were: "Teacher Assigns Complex Projects, Differentiates Between Students When Giving Tasks and Has Students Work in Small Groups," all of which were associated with lower test scores.
"The negative effect from classroom differentiation was somewhat counterintuitive," writes Biggs, who speculates that "the increased workload associated with differentiation reduced time available for more productive practices."
Within countries, "students who receive teacher-directed instruction exhibit higher math proficiency," he writes. "Asian countries appear to utilize more teacher-directed and less student-oriented instruction than lower-scoring countries."
Half of U.S. students say their math classes use group work on most days. That compares to 14 percent of students in top-scoring Korea.
Search "Project Follow Through". Researchers observed the superiority of direct instruction over discovery methods of Math instruction more than twenty years ago. This is not to say that group work has no place: peers can tutor peers, but the tutors have to understand the Math.
The US really needs a tax-subsidized competitive market in education services. The $837 billion per year State-monopoly K-12 credential industry wastes students' time and taxpayers' money.
I rarely learn through journalists' articles, Joanne, but you've succeeded. I've been following the efforts of mathematical teachers from Shanghai to teach their pedagogy to their peers in England, and the findings you present here update what I read 30 years ago in "The Teaching Gap", which extolled Japanese group work, as well as my general preference for differentiated teaching in most subjects, for its superior social effects.