Curios of the week #74

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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The week began with a visit to Melbourne and the Victorian Institute of Sport. My daughter was part of a program there and so I was the dutiful Dad who acted as chauffeur. Waiting around for her to finish gave me some time to catch up on my reading.

This week was also the start of the Olympics. While the world was debating the merits of the opening ceremony, Australians were settling down to watch the swimming. I made a comment to my girls about the footbaths that used to be installed in all swimming pools. They did not believe me and my attempt to get confirmation from Twitter/X went viral — currently 4.2 million views. I’ve never gone viral before but then again, I’ve never tweeted about footbaths before.

This week’s Curios include a surprising statistic, some misinformation, whether timed tests cause maths anxiety and much more.

Rebuttal of a rebuttal of a rebuttal of a paper of the week

I will write my own thoughts in a separate post at some point. However, for now, I wanted to highlight a new article by de Jong and colleagues.

In 2022, Lin Zhang and a group of like-minded researchers published a paper in Educational Psychology Review arguing that the inquiry orientation of most research on science teaching in the U.S. is misplaced. This prompted a very high-profile rebuttal by Ton de Jong and colleagues in Educational Research Review. I blogged about this and was asked to coauthor a paper responding to this rebuttal which Educational Research Review graciously published. Now, a new rebuttal of this response written by de Jong and colleagues has been published in Educational Research Review. Apparently, this was solicited by the editors:

“A response to our paper has recently been published in this journal (Sweller et al., 2024). This response repeated Zhang et al.’s (2022) earlier claims about what they believe the evidence shows. Sweller et al. (2024) also argued that we had ignored evidence against our position, questioned our analysis of the evidence, and claimed that one reason for favoring direct instruction over inquiry learning is that direct instruction (unlike inquiry learning) is grounded in a strong theory. The Editor of this journal invited us to write a rebuttal to their response.”

I am a big fan of scholarly debate and so I invite you to read the article which, as with all the other articles in this series, is not behind a paywall. I would be interested in your thoughts.

Self-important academic of the week

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On the subject of inquiry-oriented science teaching, one academic has taken to the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) blog to complain about the new science syllabus in New South Wales. I wrote about these new syllabuses last week. I have not examined the science syllabus in detail, so I cannot comment on the specifics, but the criticisms raise alarm bells because they downplay the learning of facts:

“When you download the Science and Technology K-6 syllabus from the NSEA website, it reads like a list of facts to be remembered. I worry the lists of facts followed by specific examples will mean more rote learning and less engaging practical work for children.

Inquiry is an essential science practice. Eminent science education scholar Roger Bybee (UK) argued over a decade ago ‘Inquiry is central to science... it should be basic in the design of school science programs, selection of instructional materials and implementation of teaching strategies’. Critically the word inquiry is not found in the Science and Technology K-6 syllabus. Distinguished Alfred Deakin Professor of Science Education Russell Tytler agrees that in this time of wicked problems like climate change and advancing technologies we must build a generation of thinkers capable of advanced problem solving.”

Just because Roger Bybee (UK) or the distinguished Russell Tytler argues something, it doesn’t make it true, but too much education ‘research’ uses this kind of argument from authority.

Thinkers capable of advanced problem solving know lots of facts relevant to the problems they are trying to solve. These are not organised as lists and nobody suggests they should be. They are organised in long-term memory according to meaning in networks known as ‘schemas’. It is the ability to activate these schemas effortlessly that both allows us to do advanced problem solving and causes us to underestimate the value of factual knowledge.

Amusingly, the author of the post, Professor Christine Preston, believes all problems could have been avoided if the syllabus writers had listened to academics like her:

“Twice in the last two years a group of science education researchers from multiple NSW universities gave extensive, research-informed advice on primary science syllabus drafts. That advice was largely ignored. “

This is a bone of contention because Preston was apparently consulted on the 2017 version of the syllabus. I wonder why the syllabus writers chose not to do so this time?

Preston also seems to think young children cannot cope with abstract concepts — things they cannot directly see like convection. I would be interested in the evidence on that because it sounds a little too much like Piaget’s discredited stage theory.

Statistic of the week

The ignoble prize is a set of ten spoof awards given out each year for the wackiest research. Famously, they are for achievements that, “first make people laugh, and then make them think,” which is exactly what this next statistic did to me.