Traditional and progressive orientations to teaching: new empirical evidence on an old debate

Sam Sims (s.sims@ucl.ac.uk) and John Jerrim (j.jerrim@ucl.ac.uk)
Additional contact information
Sam Sims: UCL Centre for Education Policy & Equalising Opportunities
John Jerrim: UCL Social Research Institute

No 22-08, CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities

Abstract: Traditionalists argue that teachers should carefully sequence the best knowledge from their subject area and deliver it directly to the whole class. Progressives argue that teachers should instead facilitate pupils' exploration of their individual interests, thereby nurturing curiosity and thinking skills. We test these claims using fixed effect models applied to data on 1,223 pupils (age 11-14) in the German National Educational Panel Study. We find few links between pupil outcomes and their teachers' orientation. The one exception is that - contrary to progressive claims - pupils develop greater interest in learning when taught by teachers with a traditionalist orientation.

Keywords: traditional teaching; progressive teaching; meta-cognition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2022-10, Revised 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec-cepeo.ucl.ac.uk/cepeow/cepeowp22-08.pdf First version, 2022 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucl:cepeow:22-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPEO Working Paper Series from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jake Anders (jake.anders@ucl.ac.uk).