Hands on learning should be mandated in every school

"Quick off topic question, where do you study?" I study at Southeast Technical Institute: http://southeasttech.edu.... My majors are business administration and financial services. "The current system uses standardized test to measure student's learning. This system is flawed in a lot of aspects. Standardized test tend to fail to teach critical thinking:" There is evidence that standardized tests fail to meet all of the desired affects. However, the standardized tests are also important in how schools get their accreditation and endowments. The government requires test scores to work with to make these judgments in performance. The idea of eliminating tests is in its infancy and would be extremely and unnecessarily risky to make the leap to eliminate standardized tests from our education system. Finland has seemingly successfully done this in their public schools, but that system would be impossible to apply to the United States conventionally. Project-based curriculum is a new idea that is being done today in some schools. There is one such high school in the city where I live and it is moderately successful but not significantly compared to their test-based counterparts. I agree with you that critical thinking is better taught in a project-based curriculum, but it would be very difficult if not impossible to successfully make such a transition and could lead to other issues that we will debate out later like we are now. In regard of your hechingerreport article there are many aspects that it brings forward. While a project-based curriculum may solve some of the issue you have to consider that it may bring with it other issues. There are many reasons that could explain why students are not learning important critical thinking and "higher-order" thinking skills. While the method in which it is being taught be a part of it, I believe the larger part of the issue is our relaxed culture that many (if not most) students take part in. Many people simply do not take their studies seriously enough and changing the learning style may not necessarily solve that problem. "In addition, the current system tend to teach students to memorize and also pushes teachers to teach to the test rather than teaching the knowledge." I believe this to be more of a teacher issue. If the teacher is unmotivated, lacking in enthusiasm, or simply unknowledgeable they will simply take the easy way out and just teach the test. There are other issues as well in some schools where they are desperate to get their accreditation so they will just purely teach the test to their students. That happened in schools in Atlanta, GA and some other places. That is only an issue with K-12 schools, not in colleges or universities. I have never seen the issue of unskilled instructors or professors in my college so I have always managed to learn and retain information quite effectively from my courses. Colleges usually only hire instructors who are not only educationally qualified but are also extensively experienced in their field so they truly know what they are teaching and are probably enthusiastic about it. " It is indeed hard to find new examples of hands-on learning for some classes, but we have to face the fact that some studies have been done. When schools have the chance, they can just replicate the study and have the students as the participants in an experiment. This in itself will help students to learn so much rather as they experience it rather than just listening to people. It is also to possible to create a scenario and have students act it out and respond based on what they have learned." There are issues with applying hands-on learning at the college level. Many students can find many activities to be trivial and quickly lose interest (I experienced that a few times), focusing on making the activities fun can actually hamper learning, failing to reflect on activities academically (usually in a lecture) ultimately makes the whole activity educationally pointless, and many abstract topics simply does not invite the idea of activities. Source: http://www.educationspace360.com... I hope you get back in time to respond in this round!