Learner-Centered Narratives
The objective, externally measured evidence of learner-centered pedagogy is rather thin.
From The Outcomes of Learner-Centred Pedagogy: A Systematic Review:
Schweisfurth (2013) suggests that there are three 'justificatory narratives' for LCP [learner-centred pedagogy] implementation. The first is the 'economic' perspective, which is based around the assumption that LCP will better prepare students for the demands of a changing world . . .
The second justificatory narrative is the 'cognitive' perspective, which essentially means that children learn more under LCP than under previous approaches . . .
The third and final justificatory narrative is the 'emancipatory' perspective, which suggests that LCP may have wider benefits to society, such as reducing inequalities, giving students more of a voice, and seeing knowledge as less 'fixed'.
Among researchers, it is well known and accepted at this point that the second justificatory narrative—that children learn more under LCP than under previous approaches—is simply false. Positive results on achievement from LCP protocols are few and far between in the literature (relative to more explicit or structured protocols), and, when we do find them, they are typically accompanied by weak effects, really bad study designs (in Shahat et al., 2017, for example, cited in the Bremner paper as an example of a study showing positive results for LCP, "the intervention and the control groups were taught by the first author"!), or highly selective or curated (i.e., weakly generalizable) instructional environments:
The objective, externally measured evidence of LCP implementation is rather thin, with only 9 out of the 62 studies reporting what we considered 'objective' evidence (with 6 of these from science teaching) . . . it is certainly noteworthy that so many contexts have introduced LCP-related changes without there being a significant body of evidence to demonstrate that LCP is more effective than what teachers have been doing previously.
One reason, I think, why the consistently poor performance of LCP (from the 'cognitive' perspective) does not stick in the general population is that people tend to believe that LCP is effective from the other two perspectives (economic and emancipatory).
But, in addition to there being no evidence for that belief, from either perspective, the belief doesn't make any sense. If LCP is relatively bad at changing cognition, then it will be relatively bad at everything relying on such changes of cognition (e.g., affecting the economy or reducing inequality).
