Where are the Robots?

Paul Chance

At least, that is the claim of many educational gurus. They warn that certain instructional programs turn students into machines, good at memorizing facts but not at using or discovering them. These robots are unable to think for themselves, it is said, so any educational effort that produces them is a direct threat to our democracy.

The programs that are said to turn out robots are, interestingly enough, those that have a body of scientific data showing that they are highly effective. By this I mean that students in these programs learn substantially more of the things schools are expected to teach than do similar students taught in other ways. These programs, not surprisingly, have certain characteristics in common:

• They are highly structured. Teachers are not free to fly “by the seat of their pants,” nor do they wait for the “teachable moment;” instead, they follow a carefully defined curriculum for part of each school day.
• The lessons are teacher-directed. In general, students are not asked what they feel like studying, but must deal with tasks defined by the teacher.
• The work is challenging. Students wrestle mainly with rigorous academic material, not feel-good social exercises.
• Instruction is fast-paced, with teachers asking and students answering many questions in a brief period.
• The programs are designed so that students are successful most of the time. Achieving goals takes effort, but they are nearly always within reach.
• Student success is frequently recognized with praise and other forms of positive feedback.
• When students don't meet the standard, they receive remedial help to bring them up to speed.
• There is a lot of practice, often including choral drill and, yes, sometimes the infamous worksheet.

Although some effective programs do not display all of these characteristics, you'll find most of them present in instructional programs that can prove, using widely accepted scientific methods, that they get markedly superior results. Perhaps the best examples are Direct Instruction and the Morningside Academy model, but other programs, such as Precision Teaching, the Personalized System of Instruction, and Mastery Learning, also qualify. (For more on these and other effective programs, see What Works in Education, available from the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in the online Store.

These proven programs are routinely said to be boring, to emphasize facts over understanding, to undermine the development of high-level cognitive skills, and, yes, to turn students into robots. Typically it is not the students in these programs who make these criticisms, nor is it their parents; it is those educators who are philosophically opposed to the instructional methods used. So far as I know, however, none of these critics has ever provided a jot of scientific evidence that these programs are harmful.

None of the highly effective programs has ever been widely used – they are philosophically incorrect in educational circles. However, some of them have been around for decades. Direct Instruction, for example, has been in use for over thirty years. That means a lot of students have been exposed to these programs. So, if the educational gurus are right, and students who go through these programs are turned into unthinking machines, then I have a question for them:

Where are all the robots?

Paul Chance, Ph.D., a former secondary school teacher, is a Senior Fellow of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies and Book Review Editor of Psychology Today magazine. He can be reached at pbchance@aol.com.

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