Learning by Discovery

AMONG the repertoire of ac cepted pedagogic techniques available to teachers, learning by discovery enjoys a proper and established place. For cer tain purposes and under certain condi tions, this procedure has a defensible ra tionale and undoubted advantages. Hence the issue is not whether it should or should not be used in the classroom, but rather for what purposes and under what conditions. Typically, however, both the propo nents and opponents of learning by dis covery tend to. take an all-or-none posi tion regarding its usefulness. Advocates of a subject-matter-oriented approach, for example, traditionally tend to de-em phasize the importance of psychological, developmental, and pedagogic factors that affect the meaningfulness of academ ic materials. They tend to assume that meaningfulness inheres in the logic of subject matter itself, irrespective of how it is presented and irrespective of the de velopmental status of the learner. Hence, from their standpoint, if an academically competent teacher presents subject mat ter logically to intellectually normal stu dents, meaningful learning outcomes can always be taken for granted. It is hardly surprising, then, that they regard learn ing by discovery as inefficient and inad visable under any circumstances, on the grounds that the learner is, by definition, insufficiently competent in any subjectmatter field to learn effectively by him self. On the other hand, as in the case of many other pedagogic devices, enthusi astic advocates of learning by discovery are prone unwarrantedly to extrapolate the advantages of this technique to all age levels, to all levels of subject-matter sophistication, to all kinds of educational objectives, and to all types of learning tasks. They tend to assume that all problem-solving and discovery experi ence is inherently and necessarily mean ingful, and that all expository verbal teaching necessarily leads to rotely mem orized glib verbalisms. They commonly assert that regardless of cognitive ma turity or subject-matter sophistication, knowledge can only be meaningfully ac quired if students have current or re cently prior concrete-empirical expe rience with the actual realities to which new ideas refer, if they acquire subverbal insight into these ideas and apply them in problem-solving situations be fore verbalizing them, and if they dis cover these insights autonomously.