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The tests that were being done by Shayer are things that according to Piaget
were found to click in before age 10. Subsequent research revealed that
these actually are understood at a variety of ages, and that some adults
never understand them. Conventional schooling does not seem to affect
understanding of these tasks, but specialized teaching using the learning
cycle with hands on/minds on lessons does have an effect. The continuous
drill which has been instituted in schools in place of education certainly
does not help students to understand these tasks. The water displacement
task seems to be impossible for students before age 7, even when shown it by
experiment. Understanding of these tasks requires both brain development,
and experience for students to construct this understanding. These are
examples of conservation reasoning.
These tasks are considered markers of concrete operational thinking and are
necessary to be understood, before higher level tasks. Notice that they did
not show research on the markers of formal operational thinking such as
proportional reasoning. This latter maker of reasoning is only acquired by
about 25% of graduating seniors in the US according to my admittedly limited
survey. But this is confirmed by others.
As to recess, this is where students interact in an unstructured setting.
This is absolutely necessary to normal development, and is where they
acquire executive functioning according to the cognitive scientists. It is
not acquired in formal classroom settings. Without good executive
functioning they can not control behavior adequately for good learning.
There are some programs designed to promote executive functioning, but they
do not resemble conventional classroom lessons, and have only been used in a
small limited set of schools. The evidence is very positive that they do
work. There was an article in the NY Times science section about them.
As to the raising of the high stakes tests, there is no use beating someone
for something that they have no control over. The teachers do not
understand or have the programs that are needed to promote good learning.
When a student is at a low level of thinking, they can NOT learn things like
algebra. When they do not understand whether to add, multiply, subtract or
divide, any advanced math is opaque. They lack proportional reasoning, and
the conventional teaching of ratios is not useful in teaching it.
The answer is that teachers need to be trained in pedagogical content
knowledge. The TIMMS report shows that European and Asian teachers have
such knowledge and ask students better questions. And of course the
American texts are entirely too long and clotted with undigested, confusing
material. But along with this districts need to allow different approaches
rather than saddle teachers with one size fits all teaching. While teaching
gobs of material may not be as damaging in schools with high SES students,
it is the kiss of death in lower level schools. Essentially it promotes a
high dropout rate, which the school welcomes as a solution to achieving good
test scores. And dropout rates are very high, but schools find ways of
hiding it such as claiming the student transferred to another school, but
this is never verified.