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

This paper investigates the inferences stemming from two opposing metaphorical portraits of

current educational methods (i.e., knowledge-transfer vs. knowledge construction metaphors) in

contrast to the facts revealed by the actual teaching practice, and its implications for educational

policy programs. To this effect, we tested the influence of the aforementioned conceptual

metaphors 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 methods),

and then conducted a study among 8 class groups (198 students) at the 6º level of primary

education (i.e., between 9 and 10 years old) of 4 schools in Logroño (La Rioja, Spain) to confirm

whether the inferences stemming from each of the education metaphors under consideration were

mirrored in the classroom. In this experiment, students were randomly assigned to one of the two

teaching 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 is

knowledge-construction). The results show a significant gap between parents’ inferences emerging

from 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 inferences

they had drawn from these two conceptual metaphors, thus showing an unfounded prejudice of

parents’ against DI’s methodologies. We discuss the implications of this research for the current

debate about teaching methodologies in Spain (and other countries), and the need for evidencebased

implementation of new educational policies.