Carl Hendrick Profile picture
Jan 11, 2024 8 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Direct or explicit instruction seems to be widely misunderstood. It's often characterised as boring lectures with little interaction and not catering to the needs of all students. Nothing could be further from the truth. A short thread 🧵⬇️
Direct Instruction (DI) as a formal method was designed by Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley Becker in the 1960s for teaching core academic skills. This was a structured, systematic approach which emphasizes carefully sequenced materials delivered in a clear, unambiguous language with examples.

It's designed to leave little room for misinterpretation and to ensure that all students, regardless of background or ability, can learn effectively.

It's also anything but boring. Here is a video from the 1960s of Englemann teaching Maths. Notice how interactive and fast paced the teaching is:
In the 1970s, Barak Rosenshine researched what makes for high quality teaching. He found that really effective teachers use direct instruction (di) as a core part of their practice and that it's about a lot more than merely explaining things ⬇️
In the 1980s, Brophy and Good looked at the relationship between teacher behaviours and student achievement. They found that explicit instruction was an integral part of effective teaching and it was in fact, a form of active teaching. They write that although there is a lot of teacher talk, most of it is "academic rather than procedural or managerial and much of it involves asking questions and giving feedback rather than extended lecturing." edwp.educ.msu.edu/research/wp-co…Image
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In the early 2000s, Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) was developed by Silvia Ybarra and John Hollingsworth and despite the harsh sounding name, is very interactive.

Something which will probably shock most teachers is that Explicit Direct Instruction suggests that teachers talk for a maximum of two minutes before engaging students in some way ⬇️Image
One major misconception is the claim that "Direct or Explicit instruction marginalises SEN pupils." This is completely untrue, in fact the opposite is probably more accurate. The EEF recommended explicit instruction as a core part of their ‘Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools’ guidance report.Image
What is the evidence base for direct or explicit instruction?
Well there's a lot but let's take the unfortunately named Project Follow Through, (initiated in 1968 and extended right through to 1977) which was the largest and most comprehensive educational experiment ever conducted in the US. Its primary goal was to determine the most effective ways of teaching at-risk children in kindergarten through third grade.

The results indicated that Direct Instruction was the most effective across a range of measures, including basic skills, cognitive skills, and affective outcomes.Image
Two astounding things I find about Project Follow Through:

1. Not only did these students (mostly disadvantaged and at-risk) do better on what was termed 'basic skills' such as reading and maths but they also felt better about themselves.
2. Secondly, many educationalists and academics not only ignored these results but actually encouraged schools to use the least effective methods from this study. As Cathy Watkins puts it: "The majority of schools today use methods that are not unlike the Follow Through models that were least effective (and in some cases were most detrimental)."
nifdi.org/research/esp-a…Image

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More from @C_Hendrick

Jul 3
New study: A single 10-minute retrieval practice activity significantly improved final exam performance compared to a review session. But there's a lot more to this study 🧵⬇️ Image
The intervention was 10 minutes of students taking an unexpected, closed-notes practice test consisting of:
- 10 multiple-choice questions created by the instructor
- Questions focused on key concepts likely to appear on the final exam
- Each question had four answer choices
- Questions assessed recall or comprehension of foundational concepts

Students were told it was ungraded and framed as preparation for the final exam. Immediately after the 10-minute test, the instructor provided corrective feedback, explaining why each answer was correct or incorrect.
The passive review was a brief PowerPoint-based presentation where the instructor delivered key concepts as bullet points to the class. Specifically, the review group received:

The same content that was tested in the retrieval practice group
Information presented in bullet-point format on slides
Instructor clarification of misconceptions
A structured overview of concepts likely to appear on the final exam

This is what the study calls a "more common instructional approach"; essentially a traditional pre-exam review session where students passively receive information rather than actively retrieving it from memory.
Read 9 tweets
May 4
This new paper is a great example of desirable difficulties in practice: Interleaving spelling tasks led to better performance on later spelling tests, even though it was harder during practice. 🧵⬇️ Image
What is interleaving and how does it work? Essentially it's really about a kind of discrimination: when learners encounter different items back-to-back, they must pay attention to what distinguishes one from the next. This strengthens their ability to categorise and apply the right rule or strategy.

Interleaving stands in opposition to "blocked practice", which is when learners focus on one type of problem, skill, or concept at a time and repeating it over and over before moving on to the next.Image
The key thing to understand about interleaving is that it leads to poorer performance in the short term, BUT better learning in the long-term.

While blocked practice can feel easier and lead to better short-term performance, it often results in poorer long-term retention and weaker transfer because it doesn’t require learners to distinguish between different types of problems or rules.Image
Read 12 tweets
Apr 4
Once again, matching teaching to learning styles has near-zero impact on student achievement. I've noticed a resurgence of the learning styles myth recently so this new study is timely. 🧵 ⬇️Image
9 out of 10 teachers still believe in the myth despite being thoroughly debunked by cognitive science. We've known this for 10 years. This to me is the most sobering aspect of all this and again, shows the pressing need for teachers to get proper training on how learning happens. Image
Even worse, the learning styles myth is still a part of teacher training in some quarters. Image
Read 9 tweets
Mar 18
Why The Forgetting Curve Is Not As Useful As You Think. Ebbinghaus' research was groundbreaking for the time but it's not really how learning happens in authentic learning situations ⬇️🧵Image
I see a lot of training where school leaders use Ebbinghaus as a vehicle to talk about retrieval practice. While the basic premise is important, I don't think it's particularly useful for teachers because it's not really how learning happens in authentic learning situations.
The forgetting curve shows that memory loss follows an exponential pattern—we forget rapidly at first, then more slowly over time. This reinforced the idea that spaced repetition can help prevent forgetting. Image
Read 7 tweets
Mar 14
New paper asks why have the same major motivation theories (self-determination theory, expectancy-value theory, achievement goal theory, etc.) dominated educational psychology for decades with little change? ⬇️ 🧵 Image
Dominant motivation theories are valuable but underspecified. The paper acknowledges that current theories have "provided tremendous advancements in the understanding of motivation" and led to successful interventions, but argues they don't adequately explain how motivation actually works at a mechanistic level.Image
There is a common formula of motivation theories. Most theories follow a similar structure where "adaptive forms of motivation (e.g., need satisfaction, mastery goals, self-efficacy) predict positive outcomes," while "maladaptive forms predict negative outcomes." This makes them somewhat obvious and difficult to distinguish from each other.
Read 12 tweets
Feb 13
What's the "sweet spot" for spacing out practice? for students scoring below 35% they likely need more instruction or support first, while students scoring above 75% probably won't gain much from spacing out their practice. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.100…Image
Specific evidence for this claim: "In Barzagar Nazari and Ebersbach's (2019a) study, the advantage of distributed practice occurred only for students scoring 3–7 out of 9.5 points, that is, 32%–74% on the first practice set. In Ebersbach and Barzagar Nazari's (2020a, Exp. 2) study, the advantage of distributed practice on transfer performance occurred only for students scoring >3.5 out of 9 points, that is, >39% on the first practice set." (p.12)
The most interesting thing about this to me is that spaced practice probably won't have much impact on students who have scored 75% or more, since they've already mastered the material which really underlines the importance of assessment for learning. In DI this is called 'placement' or mastery testing. Basically you need to know where students are at to make effective decisions about instructional strategies:

"mathematics textbook authors, teachers, and students are encouraged to adopt this practice strategy also with complex materials taking initial practice performance into account." (p.12)
Read 7 tweets

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