Pedagogical Approaches

Direct Instruction: Rosenshine (2008) says that direct instruction is the academic instruction that is led by a teacher regardless of the quality of instruction and Rosenshine (1979 in Peterson 1979) the direct instruction has the following characteristics: Academic Focus, Teacher Centered, Little student choice activity, use of larger groups and factual questions.

Evidence of Direct Instruction

(Muijs & Reynolds, 2011)  Show than:

In the UK, three major (non-experimental) studies of teacher effectiveness have been conducted in the last few decades. The first of these, Galton's ORACLE project, found that teachers labelled as "class enquirers" generated the greatest gains in mathematics and language, but that this finding did not extend to reading. By, contrast, the group of "individual monitoring" teachers made amongst the least progress. It is important to note that more successful "class enquirers" group spent four times as much time using whole-class interactive teaching than the "individual monitors" (Croll, 1996; Galton and Croll, 1980).

In (Rosenshine, 2008) the evidence presented is:

Beginning around 1968, researchers used direct instruction as a summary term for the instructional procedures used to teach higher level cognitive tasks. For example, in summarizing the results of the 27 projects involving 20,000 students in the First-Grade Reading Studies (Dykstra, 1968), one of the coordinators of the project wrote that “direct instruction in comprehension is essential.”

Example of direct instruction:

A teacher that applies the direct instruction is a teacher that explains the theme to the whole class, ask the students for silence and uses his speech to teach the theme and keep the attention of the students but even in order to keep the attention he/she could use jokes, opinions and anecdotes helping to the students to maintain the concentration. The teacher usually uses the blackboard or a power point presentation, if any student needs to ask something about the subject the teacher will answer.

Interactive Teaching: It is a variety of the direct instruction where the student is an active participant of the class, because the teacher encourage the learners to participate using questions to stimulate discussion.

Evidence of Interactive Teaching

Muijs & Reynolds (2011) gathered the next evidence:

In the UK Mortimore et al. (1988) found positive effects for the use of frequent questioning, communicating with the class and the use of ‘higher order’ questions and statements. Another study in England and Wales also demonstrated the importance of interaction to effective teaching, again factors such as using a high frequency of questions, use of open-ended questions, asking pupils to explain their answers and using academic questions being significantly related to pupil achievement. In this study, interactive teaching overall was one of the factors most strongly related to pupil outcomes (Muijs and Reynolds, 1999). More recently, effective teachers were seen to ask more questions than less effective teachers in English primary classrooms (Smith et al. 2003). Similarly Veenman (1992) found this to be a crucial element of direct instruction in his research in the Netherlands.

Constructivism: "It is assumed that learners have to construct their own knowledge-- individually and collectively.  Each learner has a tool kit of concepts and skills with which he or she must construct knowledge to solve problems presented by the environment.  The role of the community-- other learners and teacher-- is to provide the setting, pose the challenges, and offer the support that will encourage mathematical construction."   (Davis, Maher, Noddings, 1990 in Jones & Brader-Araje, 2002)

Evidence of Constructivist Teaching

That explicitly compared third-grade (6-7 year old) pupils taught using constructivist experiential methods in a traditional expository way found that the experimental group did significantly better on the post-test than the control group (McDevitt, 1994 in Reynolds, Muijs 2011). A similar result was found in a study in Korean classrooms (Kim, 2005), though in both cases it is not entirely clear to what extent the traditional model related to effective direct instruction approaches.  (Muijs & Reynolds, 2011)

Collaborative small group and peer tutoring: According to Smith & MacGregor (1992) the collaborative learning is an umbrella for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students, or students and teachers together.

Evidence of Collaborative small group and peer tutoring

An example of the use of collaborative small group works is the Jigsaw technique, develop by Aronson and associates in the 1970's, around which whole lessons can easily be structured (Aronson and Patnoe, 1997). Jigsaw works by dividing the class into groups of five of six pupils. Pupils are then each given a specific task, or a specific issue to research. Pupils go off to research. Pupils go off to research their topic, and then meet up with those pupils from other groups who have been doing the same task (for example, if the task was to look at what different intelligences mean according to Gardner, all pupils from each group with researching visual-spatial intelligence will meet up and discuss their findings). This will ensure that the quality of information found by any group member is increased. They will also rehearse their presentation with these other "experts".