Does discovery learning prepare Alberta students for the 21st century or will it toss out a top tier education system?

Here are some very important quotes from the article. We should be paying close attention to this.

In 2006, a team of three educational researchers — hailing from California, Australia and the Netherlands — combed through more than 100 “empirical studies” on discovery learning to see if it worked. Their verdict, published in the journal Educational Psychologist, was unequivocal.

“After a half-century of advocacy associated with instruction using minimal guidance, it appears that there is no body of research supporting the technique,” they wrote.

A particularly “distressing” finding, according to the researchers, was that students appeared to love discovery learning, “even though they learn less from it.”

More recently, a study led by the City University of New York conducted a meta-analysis of 164 studies on discovery learning, and concluded that “unassisted discovery does not benefit learners.”