Research and Policy

Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School - direct instruction versus exploration and play

MIT and UC-Berkeley research into learning poses the following questions and provide scientific support for the idea that direct instruction can limit young children’s learning.

“Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would… While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.”

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