Discovery learning

The argument

Discovery learning requires students to be creative and to engage their naturally curious minds to explore the world around them. Rather than impart knowledge and facts, teachers are expected to guide students through the learning process, building their self-esteem and teaching them how to learn from both their teachers and their peers, instead of what to learn. Proponents of this view note that the change is not a minor adjustment of method: it moves the centre of the classroom from the teacher's instruction to the pupils' interaction with one another, and it therefore rewards a different set of dispositions than the classroom it replaced. In modern classrooms, discovery learning takes many forms. One form, for example, is to have students work in small groups of five to ten. Rather than sitting in rows and working individually, students have to work collaboratively on problems and tasks, as they would in a modern workplace. On this argument that arrangement clearly benefits girls, who are held to be better at working cooperatively and more likely to stay focused on the task and avoid distractions. Where the work is negotiated within a group rather than set by an adult, the pupil who can sustain attention without external structure is at an advantage, and the assessment that follows measures the group's process as much as any individual's knowledge. Male learners, on this account, are usually less mature, more impulsive, and more easily distracted, and as a result they benefit more from older methods of teaching, which were more structured and had clearer expectations. A lesson with a fixed sequence, an explicit task and a visible authority supplies from outside the discipline that such a pupil is not yet supplying from within; remove that scaffolding and the same pupil loses the thread. The school system has moved decisively toward the first model and away from the second. Proponents therefore conclude that the modern school system, through its reliance on discovery learning, benefits girls more than boys.

Context

Four decades ago, teachers favoured a teacher-centric approach to learning. Students were required to memorise facts and subjects like maths and science were taught by drilling. However, in recent years, schools have adopted a more progressive style of discovery learning that better suits female students.

Premises

Counter-arguments

A study in 1990 found that female learners, when learning mathematics, performed much better when a rote learning approach was employed. This would go against the argument that females tend to do better in environments where students are engaged in discovery learning. In the same study, males performed better when they took an autonomous approach to learning maths. Admittedly, the study did find that when it came to problem-solving, rather than learning, females performed better in groups, while males performed better solving problems individually. However, the argument that old rote learning styles of memorization and recall benefitted boys does not stand. It becomes difficult to say with any degree of certainty that one method of teaching favours one gender. The reality is far more complex with individual learners sometimes favouring more auditory forms of teaching, others more tactile forms and others more visual forms. The school system is not designed to benefit one specific gender, but one group of learners. In schools where discovery learning is encouraged, more social and auditory learners might excel. In schools where other teaching techniques are adopted, visual learners or tactile learners may flourish. The school system will always benefit one segment of learners, but it is not possible to draw clear distinctions based on gender.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] We cannot apply blanket statements that assume one teaching methods benefits one specific gender. Every learner is different and some teaching methods benefit some learners, while others benefit other learners, but these demarkations cannot be made along gender lines.