ENSPM2021 Talk
Title: Explicit instruction: an example of an effective pedagogical approach to promote the success of the greatest number of students
Abstract: Over the past fifty years, numerous research studies based on observations and experiments conducted in classrooms have revealed effective teaching practices. Effective teaching is characterized by three joint effects: an increase in the average of all student outcomes, a reduction in the variance of all outcomes, and a decrease in the correlation between students’ initial characteristics (e.g., social background) and their outcomes (Bloom, 1979). First, this lecture briefly presents how this research was conducted. It then focuses on explicit instruction, an example of a pedagogical approach that has been shown to be effective in enabling different “types of students” (students with learning difficulties, « regular » students, high-achieving students), of different ages (kindergarten, primary, secondary, adult) to develop “simple” and “complex” skills, in a range of disciplines (including mathematics) and in different cultural contexts. It also presents the reason of the effectiveness of explicit instruction: it respects the cognitive load of the learner. Finally, the lecture presents an experimental study (Guilmois, 2019) conducted with more than 1000 primary school students in Martinique that confirmed the effectiveness of explicit instruction compared to socioconstructivist instruction, to learn the subtraction, the division and the notion of area.
Marie Bocquillon (Mons University, Belgium)
Marie Bocquillon works at the schools Administration Institute of the University of Mons (Belgium). She is involved in the training of future upper secondary school teachers and students enrolled in the Master in Educational Sciences. She defended a Ph.D. dissertation on initial teacher training and more particularly on the observation of teachers’ professional attitudes with regard to the literature on effective teaching. She also provides in-service (PD) training on effective teaching. She has developed the website www.enseignementexplicite.be about effective teaching and explicit instruction.