I once heard a senior colleague who is an internationally known expert in educational measurement state emphatically that “The worst thing that ever happened to education was putting it in the hands of educators.” At the time, I found that to be an overly harsh statement, but perhaps there is a ring of truth to it — and I am an educator myself. While we educators have all of the best intentions to share and disseminate knowledge, to encourage learners to explore and master material, and to improve their competencies in a certain area, we can inadvertently fall into the trap of believing that our way of doing things (e.g., teaching) is the best way it can be done. Unfortunately, disciplines can similarly develop such tunnel-vision and become too narrowly focused. When this occurs and we are uninformed about the contributions of other areas of research, we risk engaging in bad practice.
The latest American Psychologist (Sept 2009) has an interesting article on “Psychology’s Role in Mathematics and Science Education” (Newcombe et al., 2009). The authors argue that “advances in psychological research in fields such as cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive science and the emerging learning sciences or ’science of learning’” (p. 538) should be tapped to improve mathematics and science education. They argue that interdisciplinary research needs to include classroom teachers, discipline specialists, psychometricians, learning scientists, and technologists. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if true cross-disciplinary collaboration and research efforts could emerge between SCASD and local university experts in all these areas to improve math instruction?
Another article I came across is by cognitive psychologists John Anderson, Lynn Reder & Herbert Simon (2000) on the Applications and Misapplications of Cognitive Psychology to Mathematics Education which neatly picks apart the claims of both situated learning and constructivism, and notes that “data beyond anecdotes are rare in constructivist writings”. Their main message regarding so-called education reform (e.g., constructivist approaches to teaching) is: “A program of educational reform is being adopted with weak empirical and theoretical bases while a better, and better validated, program stands ready for further development and application, and that is a situation that should be and can be altered”. I can’t agree more, and we urgently owe it to our kids to do a better job.
