Carnegie Mellon Researchers Say Direct Instruction, Rather Than "Discovery Learning" Is Best Way To Teach Process Skills ...( direct instruction using concrete exa...)

direct instruction, using concrete examples and hands-on tasks so that the underlying logic is understood and the principle can be applied to a broad variety of topics. Simply exposing children to lots of undirected experience in designing experiments won?t give them the necessary feedback to distinguish a good from a bad experiment. Klahr claims that "in teaching this is type of skill, discovery learning is usually ineffective and inefficient."

"The trick is to find ways to get children to understand that what they learn about a well-designed experiment in one area -- say biology -- has the same underlying logic as a well designed experiment in some other area, such as physics or social studies," Klahr explains.

By helping children to acquire a reasoning skill fundamental to scientific experimentation, teachers may be able to help their fledgling scientists actually design experiments and interpret their outcomes.

With a $725,000 grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation and participation by several schools in the Pittsburgh region, Klahr and Chen are developing, implementing and assessing a set of instructional materials for teaching elementary school children the concepts and skills of scientific inquiry.

Klahr and Chen began by gathering data from children in second through fifth grade about how they analyze simple experiments such as what happens when springs are stretched or balls roll down slopes. Their goal was to teach these children how to design experiments that compare situations or conditions that differ in only one variable while keeping all other variables constant so that valid conclusions can be drawn. Then, through a series of questions to elicit children's explanations of their own experimental designs, Klahr and Chen are able not only to determine how kids think an experiment will play out but also to discover why they think a result will occur.

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Contact: David Klahr
klah@andrew.cmu.edu
412-268-3670
Carnegie Mellon University
13-Feb-1998

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