Abstract:

In educational discourse there is a widespread suspicion or even aversion towards the international educational measurement industry. When results from standardized tests seem to indicate that something has gone wrong with education, a common reaction from educationalists is to take a defensive position and counterclaim that there must be something wrong with the measurements. Common arguments are that they try to quantify what cannot be quantified; that they make us value what can be measured instead of measuring what we value; that they are not culturally neutral; that they put too much pressure on our schools and our students; that they make education competitive, and so on. Few seem open to consider the possibility that these measures could in fact be quite valid and may be telling us something very important that needs to be dealt with quite urgently. This theoretical paper provides some such introspection and self-interrogation towards the field of education research and argues that there is in fact good reason to believe that poor results in international educational testing are to a large extent due to faulty educational theory rather than to faulty measuring instruments. In 2006 Kirschner, Sweller and Clark published a meta-study of the psychological evidence from several decades of research on various aspects of learning, which showed quite unambiguously that many popular ideas pursued in education research, such as Problem Based Learning, Discovery Learning, Active Inquiry Learning, in their basic assumptions contradict what the most reliable psychological theories are telling us about how academic learning works. Yet almost two decades later these ideas are still being reproduced in much of educational research, and especially so in those concerning technology in education. Far too few educationalists have acknowledged that the psychological evidence in support of this educational approach is more or less non-existing. These interrelated educational ideas all share the same underlying epistemological basis and are here collected under the umbrella term learner centred pedagogy. The current paper attempts to untangle what this epistemology essentially means, where it derives from and why it dies so hard. It is suggested that part of the explanation is related to a widespread misunderstanding of Vygotsky and how his theory relates to more modern theories of psychology.

Keywords:

Constructivism, Democracy, Epistemology, Learner Centred Pedagogy, Philosophy of Education, Pragmatism, Progressivism, Technology in Education, Vygotsky.