Hands-On, Brains-Off

Methodologies and philosophies that facilitate classroom management are almost always preferred over those that facilitate actual learning.

That's not to say that classroom management and learning can't coexist, nor is it to say that most practitioners don't look to improve learning in their students. However, given the choice between a programmatic methodology or philosophy and a pedagogical one, educators seem almost always to be more attracted to the former. The environments in which they work make it nearly impossible not to have such preferences.

One such programmatic methodology—although it has pedagogical potential—is the nefarious hands-on activity, which is so beloved by elementary math teachers that entire programs can be rejected for not including it as a feature. Is it because educators see hands-on activities as vital to the academic success of students? Nope:

Patricia S. Moyer-Packenham, a researcher from George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., interviewed and observed 10 middle-grades teachers using manipulatives to teach math. In a paper published in 2001, she noted that many of the teachers saw the classroom toys as a "fun" reward for students, rather than as a way to enhance their learning.

This is a quite shocking, though not entirely unexpected, admission from even such a small sample of teachers. But it is consistent with my experience:

Most hands-on activities aren't written to help kids "move from the concrete to the abstract." They are written to keep kids firmly in the concrete, playing with fraction strips; counters; ones, tens, and hundreds blocks; etc. . . Hands-on activities are preferred because they are seen as effective classroom management tools.

In this article from Education Week, which I also linked to above, we find research that calls into serious question the current use of manipulatives in mathematics classrooms:

Researchers found that children taught to do two-digit subtraction by the traditional written method performed just as well as children who used a commercially available set of manipulatives made up of individual blocks that could be interlocked to form units of 10.

Later on, though, the children who used the toys had trouble transferring their knowledge to paper-and-pencil representations. Mr. Uttal and his colleagues also found that the hands-on lessons took three times as long as the traditional teaching methods.

Three times as long to teach kids to have a somewhat inflexible knowledge of two-digit subtraction. Certainly not a glowing endorsement of hands-on activities. Yet, the problem isn't in the manipulatives themselves (though that can't be discounted when you're talking about mathematics); it's in how they are used in instruction:

One problem is that children . . . sometimes fail to grasp the symbolic value of the objects they're using, according to a panel of experts who presented research on the topic during a national meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development held in Boston last month.

Students might correctly perform the classroom procedure, connecting 10 blocks here, for instance, or taking away blocks from another pile, without thinking about what the objects are meant to represent. Younger children, in particular, also can get lost in play with the toys or become distracted by superficial features of the toys, such as realistic details or bright colors, that have nothing to do with the academic concept being taught.

And textbook publishers, though they spend a lot of time washing their hands of what actually goes on in classrooms, also share some of the blame for this.