Problems associated with discovery and inquirybased learning

While it is true that active methods such as discovery learning and inquiry based learning are often quite effective in arousing children’s interest and in holding their attention, it is equally true that these methods are not particularly effective when first introducing children to a new subject or skill. It is much more effective to begin by teaching children new information and skills directly, rather than expecting them to discover these for themselves by trial and error. Even in subjects such as science, where discovery and inquiry have been most strongly promoted, it is now believed that direct teaching is often much more effective. If the children are first taught the information and skills they need for particular situations, discovery and inquiry activities are much more valuable later.

Unfortunately, that is not the way in which these methods are usually applied in schools. Children who lack confidence in their own ability, and who may have poor literacy, numeracy and study skills are often totally at sea in unstructured learning situations; they may look busy, but they learn and remember very little. Unstructured learning situations can create problems in learning.

Other problems associated with teaching
The following factors associated with teaching can also cause or exacerbate learning difficulties:

• The teacher, when explaining, instructing or questioning, may use language that is too complex. Children quickly learn not to listen if they do not understand what the teacher is saying – thus creating problems in learning. As teachers gain experience, they usually become more skilled in effective classroom communication.
• There may be a shortage of suitable teaching materials (books, diagrams, computer programs, maps, etc). In areas such as literacy development, for example, the provision of sufficient books and other print material at the correct level of difficulty greatly enhances children’s opportunities to learn.
• Due to pressure from an overloaded curriculum, or for other reasons, the teacher may move ahead too quickly and devote too little time for practice. As we will see later, abundant successful practice is one of the surest ways of learning effectively and developing essential skills. Practice is also essential for overcoming learning difficulties if they do arise.
• Sometimes children experience difficulties in concentrating in classrooms that are noisy or where different activities are going on at the same time. Activity methods tend to create a number of distractions that some children can’t ignore.
• Associated with classroom activities and cooperative methods is the practice of seating children in working groups around tables. Such grouping can create a very distracting situation where individual children in the group find it hard to attend to and complete their own work due to the activity of others.
• In addition, group work can create a classroom management problem for the teacher, and he or she may have difficulty monitoring children’s work closely enough to recognise when certain individuals are having difficulties. If the difficulties are not detected, no extra support will be provided and the problems accumulate. The experts suggest that teachers should address this problem by setting different levels of work for different ability groups or individuals within the class. Schools now refer to this practice as ‘differentiation’ or ‘adaptive teaching’. In reality, it is far from easy for teachers to present work at a variety of levels within the same classroom, at the same time giving high quality instruction and support to individuals. The larger the class, the more difficult it is to differentiate the curriculum effectively. Regardless of all the publicity that differentiation receives in curriculum guidelines for teachers, differentiation is actually extremely difficult to plan, implement and sustain every day.

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