Consequences of Metaphor Frames for Education: From Beliefs to Facts Through Language
Consequences of Metaphor Frames for Education: From Beliefs to Facts Through Language

Summary/Abstract: This paper investigates the inferences stemming from two opposing metaphorical portraits ofcurrent educational methods (i.e., knowledge-transfer vs. knowledge construction metaphors) incontrast to the facts revealed by the actual teaching practice, and its implications for educa-tional policy programs. To this effect, we tested the influence of the aforementioned conceptualmetaphors on 100 parents with children enrolled in primary education in relation to four criteria(i.e., perceived difficulty, effect-iveness, entertainment, and motivation towards teaching meth-ods), and then conducted a study among 8 class groups (198 students) at the 6º level of primaryeducation (i.e., between 9 and 10 years old) of 4 schools in Logroño (La Rioja, Spain) to confirmwhether the inferences stemming from each of the education metaphors under consideration weremirrored in the classroom. In this experiment, students were randomly assigned to one of the twoteaching methods corresponding to each of the conceptual metaphors targeted in this study (i.e.,Direct Instruction for teaching is knowledge-transfer and Project Based Learning for teaching isknowledge-construction). The results show a significant gap between parents’ inferences emergingfrom the conceptual metaphors on education and actual students’ performance in the experiment.Both the actual learning results and the students’ perceptions about the difficulty, entertainment,and motivation of each methodology contradict the adults’ expectations based on the inferencesthey had drawn from these two conceptual metaphors, thus showing an unfounded prejudice ofparents’ against DI’s methodologies. We discuss the implications of this research for the currentdebate about teaching methodologies in Spain (and other countries), and the need for evidence-based implementation of new educational policies.

• Details
• Contents