subbukk wrote:
On Saturday 24 November 2007 7:23 pm, Bill Kerr wrote:
I followed that link in the history to this paper which is a more direct and concrete critique of discovery learning taken too far, with well explained examples of different approaches:
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/fall99/wu.pdf
BASIC SKILLS VERSUS CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING A Bogus Dichotomy in Mathematics Education BY H. WU
Prof. Wu does well to call the bluff in treating skills vs. understanding as a zero sum game. However, I find some of his claims run counter to my own observations of how children learn. The claim "children welcome any suggestions that save labor" is simply not true. On encountering a concept for the first time, children tend to repeat it many times even though the process is quite tedious. It is only after many repetitions that they become receptive to suggestions to shortcuts. Either they discover the pattern by themselves or can be nudged gently towards the Aha discovery either by the teacher or by their peers.
So like in programming, early optimization is a no-no. My experience with learning is that I get introduced to something, then I have a period of grinding before I 'get it', then I can expand on that knowledge.
Karl
The issue that I have with algorithms being taught in schools is that they are introduced too early in the learning curve and are often introduced as "the method". I have seen many untutored people learn to do additions left to right. They would tie themselves into knots if asked to use the conventional right to left method.
Subbu
Squeakland mailing list Squeakland@squeakland.org http://squeakland.org/mailman/listinfo/squeakland