Piaget Followers Ruined Public Schools

[LPH]

The last few years have nailed down my concern that education programs training teachers are doing harm to public school students.Teachers are consistently indoctrinated into the belief that Piaget's ideas matter to helping students learn. The model has been debunked for decades but the nonsense proliferates throughout education programs.

My untested hypothesis is that as constructivism and cognitive methods became popular in public schools, student achievement decreased. A new report from Pearson shows US schools continue to trail schools in other countries.

Apparently I am not the only one concerned that this is teacher malpractice. Donald Clark summarizes the tragedy in Piaget's methods.

How did he get it so wrong? Well, like Freud, he was no scientist. First, he used his own three children (or others from wealthy, professional families) and not objective or multiple observers to eliminate observational bias. Secondly, he often repeated a statement if the child’s answer did not conform to his experimental expectation.. Thirdly, the data and analysis lacked rigour, making most of his supposed studies next to useless. So, he led children towards the answers he wanted, didn’t isolate the tested variables, used his own children, and was extremely vague on his concepts.

The Piaget nonsense is so rampant in public schools that it will take strong willed individuals to point out the fallacies and help new teachers not get trapped by a system of consistent failures.

Piaget's ideas are not the answer. The results of the Project Follow Through, the largest educational research completed to date, provides all the evidence a teacher needs to correctly promote content, knowledge, and success. The answer is Direct Instruction.

 

[Robert Heiny]

You bring up an interesting point about Piaget. I remember listening to discussions similar to the quote that lead to the preschool study that funded the initial development and trial of Direct Instruction at Col. Wolfe School in Champaign, IL. I accept, with reservations noted by Bernard Farber, Dave Harvey, and Mike Lewis, those data that indicates the usefulness of Direct Instruction for raising IQ and academic achievement scores over Piaget, SR theory, Montessori, and play.

I find interest in public schooling by higher education professors a problem beyond conducting and reporting research they conduct in public schooling. Especially by faculties at universities that receive the highest acclaim. Most of their time and effort appears to address conditions of schooling, not the active ingredients in lessons that accelerate and increase learning promptly and sometimes dramatically.

I haven't published details, but from a learners' view (ALV), if all government money related to PreK12 was removed from higher education, I wonder what would happen to standardized measured academic performance scores for PK12 learners? Would they go up or down? Would classroom teachers turn over at different rates from those reported in historical records? I wonder if costs of governmental interventions initiated beyond states can be justified beyond keeping a percentage of the population employed?

 

[LPH]

The challenge to Piaget while he collected observations is the same challenge presented by all teachers - do you accept data collected or do you ignore observations which do not fit preconceived ideas? Students of science meet this challenge during early courses - as some are tempted to fudge data or simply write down someone else's results. This is why peer-reviewed publication is vital as well as others repeating the research. However, applying scientific principles to educational research appears to be dismissed for convenience of fitting pieces of data to preconceived ideas. In other words, teachers say - "I believe in Piaget therefore it must be correct."