The Empirical Support for Direct Instruction

Abstract

In the article that stimulated the debate at the 2007 meeting of the American Educational Research Association which, in turn, led to this volume, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) concluded that direct instructional guidance was superior in effects to “minimal guidance during instruction.” But Kirschner et al. (2006) only gave a few examples of direct instructional guidance. They noted the value of modeling, of teaching self-checking procedures, of including many examples, of using worked examples, and of using process worksheets. However, in addition to these examples, there is a large research-based literature on the instructional procedures that comprise direct instruction and direct instructional guidance and I believe that these procedures fit the cognitive theory on information processing described by Kirschner et al. (2006). These instructional procedures come from two areas of research: the process-product studies of classroom instruction (Medley & Mitzel, 1963; Brophy & Good, 1986; Rosenshine & Stevens, 1986) and the research on teaching cognitive strategies (Rosenshine & Meister, 1992).