Downvoted. The information is too diluted, the post is too long and badly formatted, and after reading it I don’t know what Direct Instruction is and how it differs from other approaches. The post is written in the same style as all spamish advertisements recommending products whose only description is that they are amazing and revolutionary. In fact, I am very surprised that this post gained so much upvotes, if it hadn’t, I would probably quit reading after the first paragraph.
To improve the structure, I’d suggest:
Explain as concisely as possible what DI is and how it is different from other approaches. You have said that DI somehow uses tested algorithms. Is that it? Are there any other postulates or specific characteristics of the method? Why is it called Direct?
Give few actual examples. All I have found is the fictional example with teaching numbers (did somebody try your method to teach numbers in practice?) and an anecdote about your experience with learning languages (different people like different methods, why do you think your taste is universal here?), and there is no clear way to see how these examples correspond to DI.
Since your graphs are the most salient evidence of effectivity of DI, they should be accompanied by a link to their source.
A slightly less emotional and more technical style would improve apparent trustworthiness of the post. Specifically, don’t replace evidence by strong words (“whosoever adopts this crazy ‘teach my kindergarteners 1-20’ goal is going to horribly slow down and confuse their kids”).
Well… yeah, you pretty much nailed it with “too long and badly formatted”. NOT my best piece of writing ever. Yeesh did I ever drop the ball on that one.
Do the notes added at the beginning as a replacement for the whole long thing help to start clearing stuff up any?
The notes are somewhat helpful, yes. They directed me at the Athabasca University page where is a sort of … description. Well, to my dismay even they don’t say what DI is (except six vague features—that isn’t too much given that they say it is the only theory of instruction) before they give the readers an excercise whether they can recognise DI or not. But perhaps that’s DI in practice.
Now, let me ask few questions about the Athabasca University presentation. They say
In Direct Instruction the learners are usually responding at least 10 times per minute. This very high pace probably contributes to the heightened attention and reduced boredom observed during Direct Instruction.
It means that the teacher has on average 6 seconds to (a) convey new information (b) formulate the question (c) wait for the students’ replies (d) tell them whether they are right. This seems impossible even if we allow all learners responding at once and if the taught material needs only crude memorisation, with no students’ questions, no explanations, no writing, reading, looking at graphs… So, is the claim that each learner responds 10 times per minute correct?
There is another suspect claim:
Q: If faultless instruction fails to result in appropriate learning: A: Faultless instruction, if truly faultless, does not need revision.
This is almost a tautology (with great potential for equivocation in appropriate, fail, faultless, need etc.), but can be also viewed as a claim that DI doesn’t need revision (the answer I chose, the instruction has a problem and needs revision, has been claimed incorrect) no matter what evidence we get. Do the DI proponents in general think that when DI fails, it’s never a sign of errors in theory, but rather imperfections in implementation of the method?
And, more generally, all examples given may be used for teaching categorization of objects. How do you teach algorithms (such as multiplication)? How do you teach history and geography? How do you teach calculus? How do you teach scientific method? Not every knowledge can be reduced to questions of form “does X have property Y” taught by presenting series of objects which either are or aren’t Y. In the whole presentation there was not a single practically applicable example. Children don’t need to go to school to learn what “is longer than” or “not horizontally aligned” means.
(Again, thank you so much for working with me so patiently to get through such a big inferential distance!)
You said:
There is another suspect claim:
Q: If faultless instruction fails to result in appropriate learning: A: Faultless instruction, if truly faultless, does not need revision.
This is almost a tautology (with great potential for equivocation in appropriate, fail, faultless, need etc.), but can be also viewed as a claim that DI doesn’t need revision (the answer I chose, the instruction has a problem and needs revision, has been claimed incorrect) no matter what evidence we get. Do the DI proponents in general think that when DI fails, it’s never a sign of errors in theory, but rather imperfections in implementation of the method?
“Faultless communication” is the basis of the stimulus-locus analysis branch of the theory. If faultless communication fails with a particular learner, that gives you specific information about how the learner is not using the two-attribute learning mechanism. That tells you to shift to the response-locus analysis branch of the theory to figure out how to modify the learner so that they do use it (and the stimulus-locus analysis is more just an application of normal behavioural analysis to the situations encountered around the context of DI). For instance, it could quite possibly be that the learner is able respond, but there is a compliance issue (that’s usually relatively easy to diagnose and correct in one step). Or it could be that the learner is missing at least one logically necessary concept underlying the task, in which case the stim-loc tells you what to probe for, and the resp-loc tells you how. Once you find it, you shift back to the stim-loc to figure out how to teach the missing background bits and integrate them. Or if the learner simply can’t produce the response, you shape it (or apply context-shaping if they can produce it but in the wrong context).
Once a learner has been correctly placed in a full DI program, they’re in a context where the probability of compliance problems is drastically cut down, and continuously receiving positive reinforcement for compliance. And in the DI program the way in which later, more complex concepts logically depend on earlier, simpler concepts has already been accounted for, and students are brought to mastery on the logical pre-reqs before the dependent task is introduced, so that kind of problem is pretty much ruled-out. (Although understanding in detail how this is so requires more understanding of the knowledge-systems analysis portion of the stim-loc, and in the AthabascaU module you’ve only been shown how the communications-analysis applies to the first of the ‘basic form’ concepts in that hierarchy [that is, single-dimensional non-comparatives - ‘non-comparative’ meaning that the value of an example as positive or negative is absolute rather than relative to the preceding example])
Still, the two parts of the stim-loc and and resp-loc do interplay a lot in practice, of course.
“How do you teach algorithms (such as multiplication)? How do you teach history and geography? How do you teach calculus? How do you teach scientific method?”
You teach algorithms through ‘cognitive routines’ (a classification in the knowledge-systems analysis), if they can’t be sufficiently communicated as basic or… hold on, I should lay out a quick sketch of the hierarchy:
Basic forms:
single-dimensional non-comparatives
single-dimensional comparatives
multi-dimensional non-comparative (‘nouns’, and the reason why LW familiarity with “thingspace” should help with understanding DI)
[multi-dimensional comparatives seem to be implied to me, but Theory of Instruction doesn’t even mention them. I can see how they’d be a lot harder to construct sequences for, and would in practice be already ‘naturally’ generalized by the learner once they’ve got enough examples of basic forms of the other three types]
Joining forms:
transformations
correlated-features concepts
Joining forms are the two ways in which basic forms can be related to each other.
Transformations being generalizable systems of relating various examples of the same ‘type’ to corresponding regularities in the response [like grammar rules, spelling and reading, equivalent notations, and...I think I’m actually stipulating with those examples a much narrower range of variation in what transformations can cover than I should, but you know]
And correlated-features being communications about empirical relationships between two basic forms (“if the grade gets steeper, the stream runs faster” An example of a steeper grade is shown. “Did the stream run faster?” (not shown in the example, although they understand the verbal reference to the unshown sensory discrimination of ‘runs faster’ from a previous sequence). Learner: ‘yes’. “How do you know?” Learner: “Because the grade got steeper”).
Complex forms:
communications about events (‘fact-systems’)
cognitive routines
Complex forms being just that, complex systems of basic and joining forms.
Communications about events are kind of a systematic way of designing and teaching mind-maps (which applies to a lot of things from history and geography).
Cognitive routines are algorithms, overtized so that they can be treated as physical operations. (You get any of the factors wrong in a physical operation like opening a door—unlocking it first if necessary, how you turn the handle, direction of applied force—and the environment gives you feedback: the door stays closed! But you try to read a word the wrong way and the environment does nothing to prevent you from saying the incorrect word! Independent practice on cognitive routines new to the learner is a logically insane idea, and experiments can prove it!)
Any concept that can be classified as joining can also be treated as basic, and anything that can be classified as complex can be treated through joining or basic, if the learner is already familiar. Like, you could do a non-comparative sequence “is this calculus? yes/no”, but you couldn’t teach the discrimination of ‘red’ through a cognitive routine or fact system or one of the joining forms.
But yeah, calculus as an unfamiliar topic could of course be largely approached as a body of inter-related cognitive routines (and their inter-relations mean the teaching of the whole body can be much simplified by applying single- and double-transformations).
Cognitive strategies like ‘scientific method’… well, read this comment. Like I say there, all the concepts represented by your brain on an idea like ‘reductionism’ must themselves by reducible somehow. We might not be practically able to reduce the whole huge thing in vaguely the same way we can’t calculate the exact aerodynamics of various shapes, but we can apply basic principles to do a lot better than just throwing something together (that analogy feels a bit looser than my other physics ones, but you get the point).
And I realize most of that was probably ridiculously hard to follow and pretty much most useful to me as practice reviewing the material, but unless you have some reason to think that the book Theory of Instruction is just 376 pages (not counting index and references) of crank techno-babble by two Ph.D.‘s (fine, Zig Engelmann’s is honorary from Western Michigan University, but whatever, he’s also a recipient of a Council of Scientific Society Presidents award) who are respected by multiple other Ph.D.’s they’ve collaborated with on books and papers and the DI programs themselves… and that the contents of the book have nothing to do with the reason that the DI programs they designed actually manage to achieve success in experiments like nothing else in the field of education has...
Just get your hands on the book! Because as much as I wish I could I’m not gonna be able to repost everything in it as a series of blog posts any time soon! Check a local university library, or just order it from ADI if you can’t find a copy! (It’s forty bucks, not exactly a huge expense!)
Again, thank you thank you thank you SO much for being patient and working with me so well through such a huge inferential distance!
Thank you so much for going to the trouble of writing such long and thoughtful feedback! Especially since it’s obvious that I still have a lot of this unclear for you.
Actually, I should ask while I’m here: why are you being so diligent about pursuing this?
For me, the most obvious direction of thought would seem to be as follows (but I’m not too sure about my judgement on what would be obvious to someone who doesn’t yet understand the theory, hence why I’m checking with you):
The differences between DI and anything else (‘normal’ education and competing models together) as shown on those graphs from Project F-T are really impressive
And it did say in the meta-analysis that “DI’s consistent achievement of such scores is unique in educational research”, so the F-T results aren’t likely to be a random fluke
So there must be some explanation for that, and the possibility that the people who make this DI stuff actually know what they’re talking about—something complex and non-obvious that I don’t yet understand—at least deserves some serious consideration (...despite the fact that this idiot has so far done a terrible job at explaining what that might be :P)
If that does seem to accurately reflect what’s going on in your mind, please do tell me, because that seems like it would be of great use in fixing up my “DI to LW” communication problems.
Anyway, I’m gonna use an analogy to explain to your what this challenge of communication feels like from my perspective, and then I’ll try to give you some meatier replies to your questions.
Analogy: Imagine that you were trying to explain physics to someone who had never even heard of it. Why it’s exciting in and of itself, and the amazing engineering feats it allows you to accomplish. You gave them an introductory module on Newton’s three laws and they came back and said, “Honestly, it seemed pretty vague. And the axiom ‘moving objects stay moving unless they’re made still, and still objects stay still unless they’re made to move’ seems almost like a tautology. And how on Earth does this allow us to create ‘amazingly faster transportation’?” (Note it does not occur to them to ask the last question: “How does this allow us to engineer trains and bridges etc?”)
(Please remember, this isn’t meant as an argument by analogy! I just think it could help you to understand what I say better if you have some idea what it feels like for me trying to find good explanations. On to meatier bits.)
So you asked:
is the claim that each learner responds 10 times per minute correct?
I dunno. Offhand, it sounds plausible as something a good presenter could achieve for many sections of the programs, but it’s not like it’s mandated by the theory or empirically shown to be necessary. Get your hands on the Michel Thomas lessons for a personal experience with how this is actually not too implausible. And I could try to scan a lesson from a kindergarten reading program or something for you some time, too. (I’m from Canada, and I’m staying with a homestay during my internship in Baltimore, so I’d have to ask them if their scanner is working).
Anyway, before I go any further, have you read this short comment yet? (Just because I want you to have that background and I wasn’t able to integrate it below.)
why are you being so diligent about pursuing this?
I am not much diligent, but even if I were, I doubt my ability to state true reasons for my participation in online discussions.
The differences between DI and anything else (‘normal’ education and competing models together) as shown on those graphs from Project F-T are really impressive.
If it wasn’t clear, I didn’t mean differences in results, but differences in method. That’s still what I was complaining about: I have read several times how magnificent DI is, but still haven’t learned what the hell DI consists of. Well, I have a rough idea now, but it isn’t based on unambiguous statements.
Analogy: Imagine that you were trying to explain physics …
This was getting interesting, but was interrupted exactly at the moment when I expected you to write the most important part: how does a DI teacher explain Newton’s laws? Can you show?
From the continuation comment:
“Faultless communication” is the basis of the stimulus-locus analysis branch of the theory. If faultless communication fails with a particular learner, that gives you specific information about how the learner is not using the two-attribute learning mechanism. That tells you to shift to the response-locus analysis branch of the theory to figure out how to modify the learner so that they do use it (and the stimulus-locus analysis is more just an application of normal behavioural analysis to the situations encountered around the context of DI)....
This sound extremely vague (much vaguer than Newton’s laws ever sounded to me). Faultless communication is, as far as I understand, a technical term with some precise meaning. What’s its meaning? How is it defined? What are the basics of the stimulus-locus theory? I assume majority of LW readers aren’t familiar with the theory and if it is a key component of DI, you should give at least a brief explanation of its basics.
You teach algorithms through ‘cognitive routines’ …
Once more, nine paragraphs or so and I am not able to make sense of it (probably because I don’t know the specialised vocabulary). Somewhere in your original post you said that DI is based on algorithms which teachers apply and this doesn’t need the teacher to understand DI on theoretical level. So, consider me such a teacher who wants to teach multiplication and give me an algorithm to follow.
I… find myself quite surprised at the way my understanding of your response to my question (round the first three bullets) doesn’t seem to address what I meant to ask. Was I not clear enough, or were you just skimming around there (not that I don’t understand you skimming occasionally at this point).
Man, I just read the first sentence of this comment back to myself, and...
Well, I’ve been working on less than four hours of sleep a night for the past three days. I’ma try to keep this short by giving only a limited treatment of one point you asked about, go to bed, and give you something more detailed later.
You teach algorithms through ‘cognitive routines’ …
Once more, nine paragraphs or so and I am not able to make sense of it (probably because I don’t know the specialised vocabulary). Somewhere in your original post you said that DI is based on algorithms which teachers apply and this doesn’t need the teacher to understand DI on theoretical level. So, consider me such a teacher who wants to teach multiplication and give me an algorithm to follow.
All right, I’ll ask in the DI community for advice on good examples of places in programs that teach cognitive routines (well, places that review the whole routine at once, since the initial teaching of all the components is distributed over long sections of the script, of course). (I’ll also ask if they can give me the reference to the experimental evidence on the 1-20 vs 1-99 thing, and so on.)
But yeah, the section of Theory of Instruction on “Constructing Cognitive Routines” begins on page 191 of the text, so you being a bit confused after only nine paragraphs written by a student pretty much reciting an outline of their own mental notes is not that odd.
If you could possibly find the time to check the online catalogs of any university libraries near you to see if they have the book… because if you could easily get your hands on a copy, it wouldn’t be too hard to just try skimming the section and chapter summaries.
Downvoted. The information is too diluted, the post is too long and badly formatted, and after reading it I don’t know what Direct Instruction is and how it differs from other approaches. The post is written in the same style as all spamish advertisements recommending products whose only description is that they are amazing and revolutionary. In fact, I am very surprised that this post gained so much upvotes, if it hadn’t, I would probably quit reading after the first paragraph.
To improve the structure, I’d suggest:
Explain as concisely as possible what DI is and how it is different from other approaches. You have said that DI somehow uses tested algorithms. Is that it? Are there any other postulates or specific characteristics of the method? Why is it called Direct?
Give few actual examples. All I have found is the fictional example with teaching numbers (did somebody try your method to teach numbers in practice?) and an anecdote about your experience with learning languages (different people like different methods, why do you think your taste is universal here?), and there is no clear way to see how these examples correspond to DI.
Since your graphs are the most salient evidence of effectivity of DI, they should be accompanied by a link to their source.
A slightly less emotional and more technical style would improve apparent trustworthiness of the post. Specifically, don’t replace evidence by strong words (“whosoever adopts this crazy ‘teach my kindergarteners 1-20’ goal is going to horribly slow down and confuse their kids”).
Well… yeah, you pretty much nailed it with “too long and badly formatted”. NOT my best piece of writing ever. Yeesh did I ever drop the ball on that one.
Do the notes added at the beginning as a replacement for the whole long thing help to start clearing stuff up any?
The notes are somewhat helpful, yes. They directed me at the Athabasca University page where is a sort of … description. Well, to my dismay even they don’t say what DI is (except six vague features—that isn’t too much given that they say it is the only theory of instruction) before they give the readers an excercise whether they can recognise DI or not. But perhaps that’s DI in practice.
Now, let me ask few questions about the Athabasca University presentation. They say
It means that the teacher has on average 6 seconds to (a) convey new information (b) formulate the question (c) wait for the students’ replies (d) tell them whether they are right. This seems impossible even if we allow all learners responding at once and if the taught material needs only crude memorisation, with no students’ questions, no explanations, no writing, reading, looking at graphs… So, is the claim that each learner responds 10 times per minute correct?
There is another suspect claim:
This is almost a tautology (with great potential for equivocation in appropriate, fail, faultless, need etc.), but can be also viewed as a claim that DI doesn’t need revision (the answer I chose, the instruction has a problem and needs revision, has been claimed incorrect) no matter what evidence we get. Do the DI proponents in general think that when DI fails, it’s never a sign of errors in theory, but rather imperfections in implementation of the method?
And, more generally, all examples given may be used for teaching categorization of objects. How do you teach algorithms (such as multiplication)? How do you teach history and geography? How do you teach calculus? How do you teach scientific method? Not every knowledge can be reduced to questions of form “does X have property Y” taught by presenting series of objects which either are or aren’t Y. In the whole presentation there was not a single practically applicable example. Children don’t need to go to school to learn what “is longer than” or “not horizontally aligned” means.
{continued from last comment because of character limit}
(Again, thank you so much for working with me so patiently to get through such a big inferential distance!)
You said:
“Faultless communication” is the basis of the stimulus-locus analysis branch of the theory. If faultless communication fails with a particular learner, that gives you specific information about how the learner is not using the two-attribute learning mechanism. That tells you to shift to the response-locus analysis branch of the theory to figure out how to modify the learner so that they do use it (and the stimulus-locus analysis is more just an application of normal behavioural analysis to the situations encountered around the context of DI). For instance, it could quite possibly be that the learner is able respond, but there is a compliance issue (that’s usually relatively easy to diagnose and correct in one step). Or it could be that the learner is missing at least one logically necessary concept underlying the task, in which case the stim-loc tells you what to probe for, and the resp-loc tells you how. Once you find it, you shift back to the stim-loc to figure out how to teach the missing background bits and integrate them. Or if the learner simply can’t produce the response, you shape it (or apply context-shaping if they can produce it but in the wrong context).
Once a learner has been correctly placed in a full DI program, they’re in a context where the probability of compliance problems is drastically cut down, and continuously receiving positive reinforcement for compliance. And in the DI program the way in which later, more complex concepts logically depend on earlier, simpler concepts has already been accounted for, and students are brought to mastery on the logical pre-reqs before the dependent task is introduced, so that kind of problem is pretty much ruled-out. (Although understanding in detail how this is so requires more understanding of the knowledge-systems analysis portion of the stim-loc, and in the AthabascaU module you’ve only been shown how the communications-analysis applies to the first of the ‘basic form’ concepts in that hierarchy [that is, single-dimensional non-comparatives - ‘non-comparative’ meaning that the value of an example as positive or negative is absolute rather than relative to the preceding example])
Still, the two parts of the stim-loc and and resp-loc do interplay a lot in practice, of course.
You teach algorithms through ‘cognitive routines’ (a classification in the knowledge-systems analysis), if they can’t be sufficiently communicated as basic or… hold on, I should lay out a quick sketch of the hierarchy:
Basic forms:
single-dimensional non-comparatives
single-dimensional comparatives
multi-dimensional non-comparative (‘nouns’, and the reason why LW familiarity with “thingspace” should help with understanding DI)
[multi-dimensional comparatives seem to be implied to me, but Theory of Instruction doesn’t even mention them. I can see how they’d be a lot harder to construct sequences for, and would in practice be already ‘naturally’ generalized by the learner once they’ve got enough examples of basic forms of the other three types]
Joining forms:
transformations
correlated-features concepts
Joining forms are the two ways in which basic forms can be related to each other.
Transformations being generalizable systems of relating various examples of the same ‘type’ to corresponding regularities in the response [like grammar rules, spelling and reading, equivalent notations, and...I think I’m actually stipulating with those examples a much narrower range of variation in what transformations can cover than I should, but you know]
And correlated-features being communications about empirical relationships between two basic forms (“if the grade gets steeper, the stream runs faster” An example of a steeper grade is shown. “Did the stream run faster?” (not shown in the example, although they understand the verbal reference to the unshown sensory discrimination of ‘runs faster’ from a previous sequence). Learner: ‘yes’. “How do you know?” Learner: “Because the grade got steeper”).
Complex forms:
communications about events (‘fact-systems’)
cognitive routines
Complex forms being just that, complex systems of basic and joining forms.
Communications about events are kind of a systematic way of designing and teaching mind-maps (which applies to a lot of things from history and geography).
Cognitive routines are algorithms, overtized so that they can be treated as physical operations. (You get any of the factors wrong in a physical operation like opening a door—unlocking it first if necessary, how you turn the handle, direction of applied force—and the environment gives you feedback: the door stays closed! But you try to read a word the wrong way and the environment does nothing to prevent you from saying the incorrect word! Independent practice on cognitive routines new to the learner is a logically insane idea, and experiments can prove it!)
Any concept that can be classified as joining can also be treated as basic, and anything that can be classified as complex can be treated through joining or basic, if the learner is already familiar. Like, you could do a non-comparative sequence “is this calculus? yes/no”, but you couldn’t teach the discrimination of ‘red’ through a cognitive routine or fact system or one of the joining forms.
But yeah, calculus as an unfamiliar topic could of course be largely approached as a body of inter-related cognitive routines (and their inter-relations mean the teaching of the whole body can be much simplified by applying single- and double-transformations).
Cognitive strategies like ‘scientific method’… well, read this comment. Like I say there, all the concepts represented by your brain on an idea like ‘reductionism’ must themselves by reducible somehow. We might not be practically able to reduce the whole huge thing in vaguely the same way we can’t calculate the exact aerodynamics of various shapes, but we can apply basic principles to do a lot better than just throwing something together (that analogy feels a bit looser than my other physics ones, but you get the point).
And I realize most of that was probably ridiculously hard to follow and pretty much most useful to me as practice reviewing the material, but unless you have some reason to think that the book Theory of Instruction is just 376 pages (not counting index and references) of crank techno-babble by two Ph.D.‘s (fine, Zig Engelmann’s is honorary from Western Michigan University, but whatever, he’s also a recipient of a Council of Scientific Society Presidents award) who are respected by multiple other Ph.D.’s they’ve collaborated with on books and papers and the DI programs themselves… and that the contents of the book have nothing to do with the reason that the DI programs they designed actually manage to achieve success in experiments like nothing else in the field of education has...
Just get your hands on the book! Because as much as I wish I could I’m not gonna be able to repost everything in it as a series of blog posts any time soon! Check a local university library, or just order it from ADI if you can’t find a copy! (It’s forty bucks, not exactly a huge expense!)
Again, thank you thank you thank you SO much for being patient and working with me so well through such a huge inferential distance!
Thank you so much for going to the trouble of writing such long and thoughtful feedback! Especially since it’s obvious that I still have a lot of this unclear for you.
Actually, I should ask while I’m here: why are you being so diligent about pursuing this?
For me, the most obvious direction of thought would seem to be as follows (but I’m not too sure about my judgement on what would be obvious to someone who doesn’t yet understand the theory, hence why I’m checking with you):
The differences between DI and anything else (‘normal’ education and competing models together) as shown on those graphs from Project F-T are really impressive
And it did say in the meta-analysis that “DI’s consistent achievement of such scores is unique in educational research”, so the F-T results aren’t likely to be a random fluke
So there must be some explanation for that, and the possibility that the people who make this DI stuff actually know what they’re talking about—something complex and non-obvious that I don’t yet understand—at least deserves some serious consideration (...despite the fact that this idiot has so far done a terrible job at explaining what that might be :P)
If that does seem to accurately reflect what’s going on in your mind, please do tell me, because that seems like it would be of great use in fixing up my “DI to LW” communication problems.
Anyway, I’m gonna use an analogy to explain to your what this challenge of communication feels like from my perspective, and then I’ll try to give you some meatier replies to your questions.
Analogy: Imagine that you were trying to explain physics to someone who had never even heard of it. Why it’s exciting in and of itself, and the amazing engineering feats it allows you to accomplish. You gave them an introductory module on Newton’s three laws and they came back and said, “Honestly, it seemed pretty vague. And the axiom ‘moving objects stay moving unless they’re made still, and still objects stay still unless they’re made to move’ seems almost like a tautology. And how on Earth does this allow us to create ‘amazingly faster transportation’?” (Note it does not occur to them to ask the last question: “How does this allow us to engineer trains and bridges etc?”)
(Please remember, this isn’t meant as an argument by analogy! I just think it could help you to understand what I say better if you have some idea what it feels like for me trying to find good explanations. On to meatier bits.)
So you asked:
I dunno. Offhand, it sounds plausible as something a good presenter could achieve for many sections of the programs, but it’s not like it’s mandated by the theory or empirically shown to be necessary. Get your hands on the Michel Thomas lessons for a personal experience with how this is actually not too implausible. And I could try to scan a lesson from a kindergarten reading program or something for you some time, too. (I’m from Canada, and I’m staying with a homestay during my internship in Baltimore, so I’d have to ask them if their scanner is working).
Anyway, before I go any further, have you read this short comment yet? (Just because I want you to have that background and I wasn’t able to integrate it below.)
{goes to next comment because it hit the character limit per comment}
I am not much diligent, but even if I were, I doubt my ability to state true reasons for my participation in online discussions.
If it wasn’t clear, I didn’t mean differences in results, but differences in method. That’s still what I was complaining about: I have read several times how magnificent DI is, but still haven’t learned what the hell DI consists of. Well, I have a rough idea now, but it isn’t based on unambiguous statements.
This was getting interesting, but was interrupted exactly at the moment when I expected you to write the most important part: how does a DI teacher explain Newton’s laws? Can you show?
From the continuation comment:
This sound extremely vague (much vaguer than Newton’s laws ever sounded to me). Faultless communication is, as far as I understand, a technical term with some precise meaning. What’s its meaning? How is it defined? What are the basics of the stimulus-locus theory? I assume majority of LW readers aren’t familiar with the theory and if it is a key component of DI, you should give at least a brief explanation of its basics.
Once more, nine paragraphs or so and I am not able to make sense of it (probably because I don’t know the specialised vocabulary). Somewhere in your original post you said that DI is based on algorithms which teachers apply and this doesn’t need the teacher to understand DI on theoretical level. So, consider me such a teacher who wants to teach multiplication and give me an algorithm to follow.
I… find myself quite surprised at the way my understanding of your response to my question (round the first three bullets) doesn’t seem to address what I meant to ask. Was I not clear enough, or were you just skimming around there (not that I don’t understand you skimming occasionally at this point).
Man, I just read the first sentence of this comment back to myself, and...
Well, I’ve been working on less than four hours of sleep a night for the past three days. I’ma try to keep this short by giving only a limited treatment of one point you asked about, go to bed, and give you something more detailed later.
All right, I’ll ask in the DI community for advice on good examples of places in programs that teach cognitive routines (well, places that review the whole routine at once, since the initial teaching of all the components is distributed over long sections of the script, of course). (I’ll also ask if they can give me the reference to the experimental evidence on the 1-20 vs 1-99 thing, and so on.)
But yeah, the section of Theory of Instruction on “Constructing Cognitive Routines” begins on page 191 of the text, so you being a bit confused after only nine paragraphs written by a student pretty much reciting an outline of their own mental notes is not that odd.
If you could possibly find the time to check the online catalogs of any university libraries near you to see if they have the book… because if you could easily get your hands on a copy, it wouldn’t be too hard to just try skimming the section and chapter summaries.