Will narrow instructional models promoted by AERO crowd out quality teaching and learning?

A recent ‘practice guide’ from the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), on ‘Writing in Science’ raises significant questions about the peak body’s narrow views on teaching and learning. Is AERO leading us in the wrong direction for supporting teachers to provide a rich and meaningful experience for Australian students?

The guide  explains the nature of simple, compound and complex sentences in science. It  provides student writing with feedback  teachers could provide to improve the writing. There are suggestions for teachers to generate and unpack exemplar sentences and lists of nouns and adjectives, provided by practice exercises. 

Yet a close reading shows these analyses fall well short of best practice in analysing science writing. Further, this advice is missing any comprehensive linguistic account of grammar as resource for meaning in text construction;any critical perspective on the function different kinds of texts to make sense of science, and; any attention to the commitment of teachers of science to developing science ideas. 

We are world leaders

Yet, Australian researchers in literacy are world leaders in thinking about the functions of text in generating meaning across different genres and writing to learn in science. 

AERO has ignored such research. It  sacrifices what we know about engaging and meaningful teaching and learning practice on the altar of its ideological commitment to impoverished interpretations of explicit teaching. 

While the practice guide is  useful for alerting teachers to the importance of explicit attention to writing in science, it could do better by drawing on our rich research base around meaningful pedagogies –  (which include explicit teaching elements) that engage students and enrich science teachers’ practice.  

This story of ignoring a wealth of sophisticated Australian and international research to enforce a simplistic instructional model is repeated across multiple curriculum areas, including science and  mathematics. AERO’s ‘evidence based’ model of a ‘science of learning’ is based exclusively on studies involving one research methodology. It uses experimental and control conditions that inevitably restrict the range of teaching and learning strategies compared to those found in real classrooms. 

The research findings of the community of Australian and International mathematics and science education researchers who have worked with students and teachers over many decades to establish fresh theoretical perspectives and rich teaching and learning approaches have been effectively silenced. 

What underpins this narrowing?

What underpins this narrowing of conceptions of teaching and learning that seems to have taken the Australian education system by storm? AERO bases its instructional model almost entirely on the theoretical framing of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), particularly the research of John Sweller who over four decades has established an impressive body of work outlining the repercussions of limitations in working memory capacity. 

Sweller argues that when students struggle to solve complex problems with minimal guidance, they can fail to develop the schema that characterise expert practice. His conclusion is that teachers need to provide ‘worked examples’ that students can follow and practice to achieve mastery, an approach aligned with the ‘I do’, ‘we do’, ‘you do’ advocacy of AERO and the basis of the mandated pedagogy models of both New South Wales and Victoria. 

The argument that students can lose themselves in complexity if not appropriately guided is well taken. But this leap from a working memory problem to the explicit ’worked example’ teaching model fails to acknowledge the numerous ways, described in the research literatures of multiple disciplines, that teachers can support students to navigate complexity. In mathematics and science this includes the strategic setting up of problems, guided questioning and prompting, preparatory guidance, communal sharing of ideas, joint teacher-student text construction, or explicit summing up of schema emerging from students’ solutions. 

What really works

The US National Council of Teachers of Mathematics identifies seven, not one, effective mathematics teaching practices some but not all of which involve direct instruction.  An OECD analysis of PISA-related data identified three dominant mathematics teaching strategies of which direct instruction was the most prevalent and least related to mathematics performance, with active learning and in particular cognitive engagement strategies being more effective. 

Sweller himself (1998) warned against overuse of the worked example as a pedagogy, citing student engagement as an important factor. Given these complexities, AERO’s silencing of the international community of mathematics and science educators seems stunningly misplaced. 

This global mathematics and science education research represents a rich range of learning theories, pedagogies, conceptual and affective outcomes, and purposes. The evidence in this literature overwhelmingly rejects the inquiry/direct instruction binary that underpins the AERO model. Further, the real challenge with learning concepts like force, image formation, probability or fractional operations has less to do with managing memory than with arranging the world to be seen in new ways. 

To be fair, the CLT literature has useful things to say about judging the complexity of problems, and the strong focus on teacher guidance is well taken, especially when the procedures and concepts to be learned are counter-intuitive. However, CLT research has mainly concerned problems that are algorithmic in nature, for which an explicit approach can more efficiently lead to the simple procedural knowledge outcomes involved. 

The short term advantage disappears

Even here, studies have shown that over the long term, the short-term advantage of direct instruction disappears. The real issues involved in supporting learning of complex ideas and practices are deciding when to provide explicit support, and of what type. This is where the teacher’s judgment is required, and it will depend on the nature of the knowledge, and the preparedness of students. To reduce these complex strategies to a single approach is the real offence of the AERO agenda, and of the policy prescriptions in Victoria and NSW. 

It amounts to the de-professionalisation of teachers when such decisions are short-circuited. 

Another aspect of this debate is the claim that a reform of Australian teaching and learning is needed because of the poor performance of students on NAPLAN and on international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS. While it is certainly true that we could do much better in education across all subjects, particularly with respect to the inequities in performance based on socio-economic factors and Indigeneity, our relative performance on international rankings is more complex than claimed. 

Flies in the face of evidence

To claim this slippage results from overuse of inquiry and problem-solving approaches in science and mathematics flies in the face of evidence. In both subjects, teacher-centred approaches currently dominate. An OECD report providing advice for mathematics teachers based on the 2012 PISA mathematics assessment revealed Australian students ranked ninth globally on self-reporting memorisation strategies, and third-last on elaboration strategies (that is, making links between tasks and finding different ways to solve a problem). The latter strategies indicate the capability to solve the more difficult problems. 

While it may be true some versions of inquiry in school science and mathematics may lack necessary support structures, this corrective of a blanket imposition of explicit teaching is shown by the wider evidence to represent a misguided overreaction. 

How has it happened, that one branch of education research misleadingly characterised as ‘the’ science of learning, together with a narrow and hotly contested view of what constitutes ‘evidence’ in education, has become the one guiding star for our national education research organisation to the exclusion of Australian and international disciplinary education research communities? 

Schools are being framed as businesses

It has been argued AERO ‘encapsulates politics at its heart’ through its embedded links to corporate philanthropy and business relations and a brief to attract funding into education. Indeed, schools are increasingly being bombarded with commercial products. Schools are being framed as businesses. 

The teaching profession over the last decade has suffered concerted attacks from the media and from senior government figures. Are we seeing moves here to systematically de-professionalise teachers and restrict their practice through ‘evidence based’ resources focused on ‘efficient’ learning? Is this what we really want as our key purpose in education? In reality, experienced teachers will not feel restricted by these narrow versions of explicit teaching pedagogies and will engage their students in varied ways. How can they not? 

If the resources now being developed and promoted under the AERO rubric, as with ‘Writing in Science’, follow this barren prescription, we run the danger of a growing erosion of teacher agency and impoverishment of student learning.

We need a richer view of pedagogy

What we need, going forward, is a richer view of pedagogy based on the wider research literature, rather than the narrow base that privileges procedural practices. We need to engage with a more complex and informed discussion of the core purposes of education that is not proscribed by a narrow insistence on NAPLAN and international assessments. We need to value our teaching profession and recognise the complex, relational nature of teaching and learning. Our focus should be on strengthening teachers’ contextual decision making, and not on constraining them in ways that will reduce their professionalism, and ultimately their standing.