Why So Many Kids Struggle to Learn

WHEN ERIC KALENZE was getting his master’s degree in education in the 1990s, he was immersed in pedagogical theories that have prevailed at ed schools for a century. Learning proceeds best, he was told, when focused on skills like critical thinking and tailored to the interests of individuals. Rather than assuming the role of a “sage on the stage,” depositing facts into children’s passive brains, a teacher should be a “guide on the side,” enabling students to learn primarily through inquiry and hands-on activities. Kalenze was dubious. None of this jibed with what he recalled of his own school experience or his gut-level sense of what works.

But when he became a high school English teacher, he figured he would give it a try. When he covered The Great Gatsby, he didn’t explicitly teach his students about the symbolism of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. Instead, he had them spend two or three days looking up meanings of the word green, finding magazine ads using that color, cutting them out, and making collages. He would ask questions like, “Why do you think they used green for this product that’s a lotion?” and hope the response would be something like, “Because it makes you feel fresh and youthful.”

Kalenze’s students loved him, and other teachers observed his classes because they’d heard the buzz. But after a few years, writing assignments and class discussion showed that his apparently engaged students weren’t grasping Gatsby’s significance. He also discovered books by E. D. Hirsch Jr. and Diane Ravitch that reinforced his initial feeling that what was called “progressive” or “constructivist” pedagogy didn’t place enough value on building students’ knowledge through explicit instruction. Kalenze realized that his students didn’t know enough about the 1920s to appreciate why Gatsby was considered the Great American Novel and not just another tale of unrequited love.

So he stopped having his students make collages and started supplying some of that history. He told them that the era was a time of liberation for many, especially women, but also a time of growing economic inequality—and “then this book comes out that basically says all that amid a love story.” That background provided “an anchor,” he says, for subsequent class discussion, and his students’ understanding of the book “changed wildly.”

“No one ever told me to do that,” he says. “They just told me to have the kids read for enjoyment, and make it as engaging as possible.”

KALENZE’S EXPERIENCE LINES UP with what scientists have discovered in recent decades: that acquiring factual information isn’t a useless, soul-crushing exercise; it’s the prerequisite for higher-order thinking. Asking students who don’t know much about a topic to learn through inquiry or “discovery” is inefficient at best. Projects and hands-on activities often waste precious time. Engagement is crucial, but it’s quite possible for students to be highly engaged without learning anything important.

The foundations of modern cognitive science go back 70 years, with many of its advances stemming from research in artificial intelligence and information technology. Application of the principles to teaching methods is a more recent development; a landmark 2006 article by three cognitive psychologists—Paul A. Kirschner, John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark—used a title that attempted to cover the range of approaches favored by educators: “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.” “The past half-century of empirical research on this issue,” the authors wrote, “has provided overwhelming and unambiguous evidence that minimal guidance during instruction is significantly less effective and efficient than guidance