What's the Meaning of “Direct Instruction”?

Some blog followers might be interested in a recent discussion-list post “The Effective But Forgotten Benezet Method of K-8 Education - Response to Camp” [Hake (2012b)], which might better have been titled “WHAT'S THE MEANING OF 'DIRECT INSTRUCTION'?” The abstract reads:

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ABSTRACT: In my post “The Effective But Forgotten Benezet Method of K-8 Education” [Hake (2012a)] at http://bit.ly/SbTiWD, I listed as one of the reasons that the Benezet Method http://bit.ly/926tiM is virtually forgotten is “the opposition of those who favor ‘direct instruction’ (i.e., ‘drill and practice’) in the early grades.”

PhysLrnR’s Paul Camp responded: “THAT'S NOT WHAT DIRECT INSTRUCTION REFERS TO AND YOU KNOW IT.”

Camp evidently thinks “direct instruction” has some commonly accepted meaning. But had Camp bothered to scan my complete 21 kB post at http://bit.ly/SbTiWD, he might have noticed my emphasis on the ambiguity of that term and my guess as to its operational meaning to those who oppose the Benezet Method. Therein I wrote:

“The ambiguous phrase ‘direct instruction’ is used [here] in the ‘Mathematically Correct’ http://bit.ly/beOVtu sense discussed in ‘Language Ambiguities in Education Research’ (Hake, 2008) at http://bit.ly/bHTebD: “ ‘DRILL AND PRACTICE,’ ‘non-hands-on,’ ‘teach ’em the facts’ (Metzenberg, 1998) at http://bit.ly/9rGbSj (scroll down to just above “AAAS Benchmarks for Science Literacy”), and ‘non-discovery-learning,’ where ‘discovery learning’ means setting students adrift either in aimless play or ostensibly to discover on their own, say, Archimedes’ principle or Newton’s Second Law.”

In “Language Ambiguities in Education Research” I indicate my guesses as to what the following groups have meant by “direct instruction”: (a) Mathematically Correct, (b) physics education researchers, (c) Klahr & Nigam (2004) in “The equivalence of learning paths in early science instruction: effects of direct instruction and discovery learning” http://bit.ly/9jzh39 (the CMU server was down on 03 Sept 2012 but will probably recover), and (d) Association Of Direct Instruction http://www.adihome.org/.
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To access the complete 16 kB post please click on http://bit.ly/PWS8aj.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
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"When we say force is the cause of motion we talk metaphysics, and this definition, if we were content with it, would be absolutely sterile. For a definition to be of any use, it must teach us to measure force; moreover, that suffices; it is not at all necessary that it teach us what force is in itself, nor whether it is the cause or the effect of motion."
- Henri Poincare

REFERENCES [URL’s shortened by http://bit.ly/ and accessed on 03 Sept 2012.]
Hake, R.R. 2012a. “The Effective But Forgotten Benezet Method of K-8 Education,” online on the OPEN AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/SbTiWD. Post of 02 Sep 2012 15:28:15-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists and are also on my blog “Hake’sEdStuff” at http://bit.ly/ORLO6e with a provision for comments.

Hake, R.R. 2012b. “The Effective But Forgotten Benezet Method of K-8 Education – Response to Camp,” online on the OPEN AERA-L archives at http://bit.ly/PWS8aj. Post of 3 Sep 2012 13:20:41-0700 to AERA-L and Net-Gold. The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists.