Teachers Are Better at Teaching than Children

“[Research in cognitive psychology] helps explain why students taught with structured curricula generally do better than those taught with either more individualized or discovery learning approaches. It also explains why young students who receive their instruction from a teacher usually achieve more than those who are expected to learn new materials and skills on their own or from each other. When young children are expected to learn on their own, particularly in the early stages, the students run the danger of not attending to the right cues, or not processing important points, and of proceeding on to later points before they have done sufficient elaboration and practice.”
Barak Rosenshine and Robert Stevens
“Teaching Functions,” in
Handbook of Research on Teaching (Macmillan, 1986)