Re:How Chinese Education System Helps and Hurts China
by wisty on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @06:53AM
(#2894846)
And I don't believe that the methods which are intended to produce people "capable of evaluating the claims of politicians and making the most desirable choice (for that person) in the voting booth" are really effective at that.
You can't teach creativity. OK, maybe you can, but the approach of "throw the students in a group, and tell them to do something creative" is probably not exactly optimal.
Do teachers give any kind of useful guided instruction on high-level skills? Or do they just grade the assignments based on presentation?
Guided instruction: "Have you thought about this? What would change if you did that?"
Direct instruction: 2+2 = 4. 2+2 = 4. 2+2=4. 2+2=4. (repeat until the student exhibits the desired response to the stimulus).
Direct instruction is indeed effective if what you're after is a set response to a given stimulus. Some would question, though, whether this is sufficient to produce an individual capable of autonomous thinking. Behaviorism is awesome if you want an animal to press a bar on cuee, less effective if what you're after is (e.g.) a person capable of evaluating the claims of politicians and making the most desirable choice (for that person) in the voting booth.
Your paper hit pretty hard on the applicability of direct instructions for simple, algorithmic tasks (e.g., the number of arithmetic problems solved per minute), precisely the type of task where memorization and regurgitation is a valid strategy.