Yesterday, I wrote on this blog about a French study that found explicit instruction in underprivileged schools to be particularly effective in helping children master basic math skills. The discussion on explicit instruction vs constructivist methods in math education remains crucial. The message was clear: clear explanations, guided practice, and feedback make a big difference, especially for those at risk of falling behind. The great advantage of this blog is that I receive a lot of feedback, which often leads to discoveries.
Terry Pears shared another study (Çibukçiu, 2025) that appears to shift the balance somewhat. In Kosovo, they studied third-graders who used constructivist methods to solve mathematical problems. The focus wasn’t on automating subtraction or area calculations but on reasoning, making connections, and devising solutions. The results? Here too, clear gains were observed. The children who received constructivist instruction performed significantly better on problem-solving tasks than their classmates who used more traditional methods.
If you compare the two studies, you won’t actually see a contradiction, but rather a complement to what I wrote in my first blog post and in The Ingredients for Great Teaching. The French study focuses on basic knowledge and skills, where explicit instruction demonstrates its power. The Kosovo study focuses on problem-solving, where constructivist methods predominate. Together, they make it clear that the perennial contradiction in the so-called “math wars”—explicit versus constructivist—is primarily a false one. It’s not a matter of either-or, but of using the right tool at the right time.
Children need strong foundations: fluency in math, understanding operations, and solidifying the fundamentals in their memory. Explicit instruction helps most with this. However, if we want them to be able to apply math in new situations, reason, and devise creative solutions. In that case, we must also provide them with the opportunity to explore, discuss, and learn constructively together.
The lesson from both studies? Good math education requires pedagogical precision and teachers who, while observing their classroom and their goals, choose the right teaching methods. And if they see something isn’t working, they try something else.
Abstract of the study :
This study examines the impact of constructivist methods on students’ performance in mathematical problem-solving, which is a significant issue in contemporary educational research. Traditional teaching methods, which are often oriented towards rote learning and memorization, have limitations in increasing students’ performance in solving mathematical problems. This research has analyzed how constructivist methods have a major impact on the third-graders’ performance in solving these problems. In this research, a quantitative method with a quasi-experimental design was used. The sample consists of 143 third-graders, who were separated into two groups; the experimental group which used constructivist methods for solving mathematical problems and the controlled group which continued using traditional methods through standard teaching materials and relevant textbooks. All students were tested on mathematical-problem solving twice, once before the intervention and once after the intervention. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS (version 27) and included Paired Samples T-test analysis. The results of the Paired Samples T-Test show a statistically important difference between the average scores before and after the use of constructivist methods in students’ performance for solving mathematical problems. The average score in the pre-test was M = 39.77, while in the post-test it was M = 59.46, with an average difference of −19.69 and a statistical significance of p < 0.001. This study confirms that the use of constructivist methods in solving mathematical problems has a significant positive impact. These findings suggest that the integration of constructivist methods in teaching mathematics can be an effective strategy to help improve students’ performance in solving mathematical problems.