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Published: 24 April 2025

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Despite the long history of empirical support for Direct Instruction, unsurprisingly there have also been criticism – and some laughter!

Surely, no other approach has so polarised educators as has DI. The criticisms have been based on a number of different grounds. Some are fanciful, some shallow, some purely emotional, and many result from ideologically based beliefs regarding learning.

(a) Conspiracy theories

• DI is an IBM/ McGraw-Hill conspiracy to oppress the masses/profiteer (Kohn, 2002; Nicholls, 1980).

• DI is a Christian right wing conspiracy (Berliner, 1996).

• “Critics contend that tack [ accepting DI] threatens to mandate the rote teaching style favored by religious conservatives and back-to-basics zealots” (Learn, 1998).

• It is designed to fuel a “global workforce training agenda” (Iserbyt, 1999, p.150). It’s to indoctrinate students into submitting to a life in the unskilled workforce (Shannon, 2007).

• It’s really about indoctrination: When I returned to the United States I realized that America’s transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare (bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the “system” in all areas of government—federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the “system’s” control would take place in the school—through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification, which comes under so many labels: the most recent labels being Outcome-Based Education, Skinnerian Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction (Iserbyt, 1999, p. XV).

• There is a conspiracy among researchers, publishers, and policy makers (Goodman, 2002; Zemelman, Daniels, & Bizar, 1999). "The research evidence is being distorted and purposefully misrepresented in ideologically consistent ways, in politically consistent ways, in reliably profitable ways" (Allington, 2002).

(b) It has negative side effects

• “DI is a teaching method that bypasses the brain and causes an unnatural reflex that is controlled and programmed. This manipulation causes some students to become so stressed that they actually become ill and/or develop nervous tics” (Hayes, 1999).

• "It really does damage kids: socially, morally, as well as intellectually. It’s just too narrow and constrictive" Rheta DeVries, professor of curriculum and instruction, Regent’s Center for Early Development and Education, University of Northern Iowa.

• “Tullis makes the claim that "early exposure to academics" has the potential "to psychologically damage developing brains," and can lead to physical health problems, including (but presumably not limited to) "depression, anxiety disorders--even cardiovascular disease and diabetes." (Engelmann, 2012, p.1).

• DI produces more felony arrests, and more time in special education for emotional impairment, lower level school completion, and fewer living with their spouses. (HighScope) https://highscope.org/what-we-offer/the-highscope-curriculum/preschool-curriculum/#:~:text=The%20HighScope%20Preschool%20Curriculum%20is,direct%20evaluation%20of%20the%20curriculum.

• DI students can’t think "When they have to think for themselves, they’re waiting to be told how." Psychologist Rebecca Marcon, www.titlei.com/samples/direct.htm

• It's “fact accumulation at the expense of thinking skill development” (Edwards, 1981) 

• DI damages students, causing delinquency (Schweinhart, Weikart, & Larner, 1986. Further, its "side effects may be lethal" (Boomer, 1988, p. 12). “It (direct instruction) is a scripted pedagogy for producing compliant, conformist, competitive students and adults.”

• "It's extremely authoritarian," observes Larry Schweinhart of the High Scope/Perry Research Project in Ypsilanti, Mich., and can lead children to "dependency on adults and resentment" (Duffrin, 1996, p.4) (cited in Coles, 1998). See also McKeen et al., 1972.

• “Direct Instruction has become today's federally-sanctioned child abuse for poor children” (Horn, 2007).
• “Clearly, the aid with the most strings of dependence for both teachers and students comes from the University of Oregon's Direct Instruction Model because it makes the teacher rely completely on curriculum programmers; it ignores the experience and knowledge of students altogether with its standardization of methods, making students dependent on lessons to learn to read.” (Shannon, 1988, pp. 36-37)

(c) Its view of the reading process is wrong (Gollash, 1980).

•  DI focusses on phonics, which is a bad approach (Meyer, 2003).

• It focusses on sight words: “Directed Instruction, although it gives lip service (pardon the pun) to phonics, seems to weight the instruction unavoidably in the direction of sight reading merely by virtue of group oral recitation from the text” (Fritzer & Herbst, 1999, p. 46).

• It emphasises phonics at the expense of comprehension (Jordan, Green, & Tuyay, 2005).

• It’s rote learning only, and doesn’t lead to conceptual understanding and problem solving (Ewing, 2011).

• "It's rote, it's memorization, it's not good solid practice," Karen Smith, associate director of the National Council of Teachers of English. "It goes against everything we think."(Duffrin, p.1)

• DI produces "A Nation of Rote Readers" (Coles, 2001).

(d) It is incompatible with other more important principles:

• Normalisation (Penney, 1988).

• The wholistic nature of reading (Goodman, 1986; Giffen, 1980)

• A naturalistic educational paradigm (Heshusius, 1991).

• Flexible reciprocal child-teacher interaction (Ashman & Elkins, 1990).

• Teacher professionalism and creativity - the scripts deskill teachers. (Denise, 2008; McFaul, 1983). “the proletarianization of teacher work” (Giroux, 1985, p. 376).

• Constructivism which asserts that students create their own knowledge rather than simply absorbing information presented by others, like teachers. DI is antithetical to the constructivist attitude that there are multiple representations of reality, none of which is automatically nor necessarily superior or inferior to the others. Duffy (2009) reflects how the direct-instruction researchers have focused on research in which variables are manipulated in tightly controlled experiments.…[whereas] the constructivist approach is to study rich learning environments, examining the variables in the context of those environments” (p. 354-355). You thus can’t compare the two approaches - like comparing apples with oranges. “Each relies on intellectual biases that would leave the other at a disadvantage were we to compare results” (Jonassen, 2009, p. 29). Confrey (1990) puts the constructivist position as being incompatible with Direct Instruction “We can have no direct or unmediated knowledge of any external or objective reality. We construct our understanding through our experiences, and the character of our experience is influenced profoundly by our cognitive lenses (p.108).

(e) The success of DI is illusory:

•  It is based on tests that do not measure real reading (Cambourne, 1979, Kohn, 1999; Nicholls, 1989).

• The apparent research support is not persuasive because empirical research can’t answer questions of superiority of methods (Weaver, 1988). “We don’t have an approach, we have a philosophy” (Horsch Erikson Institute, cited in Duffrin, 1996, p.6)

• It can’t work because it’s wrong: “ … in education, a priori beliefs about the way children ought to learn or about the relative value of different kinds of knowledge seem to have tremendous force in shaping judgments about effectiveness” (Traub, 2002).

• Operation Follow Through did not prove DI was effective (Kohn, 1999).

(f) Other approaches are more effective, for example,

• Whole Language (Weaver, 1991),

• Discovery learning (Bay, Staver, Bryan, & Hale, 1992)

• As effective as DI (Kuder, 1990; O’Connor et al., 1993).

(g) It may be inappropriate for certain sub groups.

•  Those in special education (Heshusius, 1991; Kuder, 1991; Penney, 1988).

• Those with certain learning styles, for example, those with an internal locus of control (McFaul, 1983; Peterson, 1979).

• Learning disabled students: “The failure of Direct Instruction to teach learning disabled children to read seems to be related to bad instructional design” (Allington, 2003).

• Those of high ability (Peterson, 1979).

• It’s not appropriate for indigenous students (Ewing, 2011; Sarra, 2011).
• It's only for the poor and at-risk (Eppley, 2011)

(h) Its use is best restricted to basic skill development (Peterson, 1979).

(i) It is best used in conjunction with other approaches (Delpit, 1988; Gettinger, 1993; Harper, Mallette, Maheady, & Brennan, 1993; Spiegel, 1992; Stevens, Slavin, & Farnish, 1991).

(j) Students might not find it acceptable (Reetz & Hoover, 1992).

• It destroys motivation by having students practise too much. “Heavy doses of practice with exercises that seem pointless to children further deaden interest and thinking” (Baroody & Ginsburg, 1990, p.58).

(k) Relationships, not instruction, are what evoke learning (Sarra, 2011; Smith, 2003).

(l) A lack of basic humanity.

•  Aspects of the programs, such as prescribed curriculum materials and instructions, are viewed as dehumanizing because they are centred in teaching materials rather than in people (Goodman, 1998).

• Siegfried Engelmann’s DISTAR (Reading Mastery) and ECRI are both based on the very sick philosophical world view that considers man nothing but an animal” (Iserbyt, 1999, p.212).

• DI renders learners passive (Becher, 1980; Johnson, 2004). “Indeed, it is often regarded as offensive to students, assuming they can only learn from a script; and offensive to educators, assuming they can only teach from a script; and both scripts are written by some old guy in the US” (Sara, 2011). It's "pouring of information from one container, the teacher’s head, to another container, the student’s head" (Brown & Campione, 1990, p. 112).

• It's too regimented (Borko & Wildman, 1986)   

(m) It’s simply old-fashioned teaching:

• “ … the heart of Direct Instruction is group chanting (while following a text) in response to the teacher's scripted hand signals, analogous to the old "blab schools" of the 19th century, in which students recited in groups to memorize and feed back material” (Fritzer, & Herbst, 1999, p.45). … “lock step focus on drill and rote learning” (Fogarty & Schwab, 2012).

(n) It’s just Skinnerian behaviourism.

• … instructional approaches now being imposed are something that most in the audience wouldn’t want their own children to suffer. These approaches have, he said, more to do with teaching rats than humans. He urged his audience to reclaim good instruction with attention to the lessons of social constructionism instead of treating students with a behaviorist approach in which, as B.F. Skinner proved, even pigeons can be taught to play ping-pong … DI is a steroidal scripted behaviorist methodology very popular with urban school policymakers and the Reading First thugs who make their curricular choices for them in Title I schools. No middle class suburban parent would ever permit this kind of cognitive decapitation of their children” (Horn, 2007).
• “Engelmann’s DI claims to be scientific as it rests upon the outmoded behaviourism of B.F. Skinner, an approach buried by Chomsky in his review of verbal behaviour in way back in 1967” (Sarra, 2011, p.1).

(o) It only looks good because it’s old.

"One of the problems is that to have proven programs, you have to have old programs," adds Richard L. Allington, the chairman of the reading department at the State University of New York at Albany. "Most of these Direct Instruction programs have been around 25 or 26 years, which is why there's more 'research' on them." If Direct Instruction looks good, Mr. Allington and others say, it may be because there is a dearth of effectiveness data on anything else” (Viadero, 1999).

(p) It ignores higher order thinking, and, further, stifles it (Doyle, Sanford, & Emmer, 1983).

• Teaching is didactic, so students don’t learn how to have discourse among themselves (Ewing, 2011).

(q) Zig shouldn’t be taken seriously:

• “an obscure educationist named Engelmann” (Rundle, 2009, p.1).

• “written by some old guy in the USA” (Sarra, 2011).
• “Engelmann DI advocates are not like most quality educators. They are zealots convinced they have the one true faith and the rest of us are heretics.”

Sarra, C. (2011). Not the only way to teach Indigenous students. National Indigenous Times. Retrieved from https://chrissarra.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/not-the-only-way-to-teach-indigenous-students/

(r) The effects may be short lived:

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy (2012) does not include Direct Instruction among its list of evidence-based approaches because of their perception of a lack of long term effect studies.

This from a personal communication (July 11, 2012) from a Coalition spokesperson.

"We have reviewed the evidence supporting Direct Instruction and our overall thought is that, while a number of studies have found promising short-term effects of the model, more rigorous evaluations with longer-term follow-ups are needed to determine whether it produces sustained effects on important academic and behavioral outcomes. The reason we look for evidence of sustained effects is to rule out the possibility that any observed short-term effects quickly fade away, a phenomenon which is unfortunately quite common in education. There have been a handful of such long-term studies of Direct Instruction, but they’ve tended to suffer from key limitations that make it difficult to draw firm conclusions about its sustained effectiveness (e.g., because studies had very small sample sizes or Direct Instruction was combined with other interventions when evaluated)" (para 1, 2).

Jean Stockard has performed the task of compiling a DI research database to enable those interested to study the research themselves and make decisions about program evidence:

“Quantitative mixed models were used to examine literature published from 1966 through 2016 on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction. Analyses were based on 328 studies involving 413 study designs and almost 4,000 effects. Results are reported for the total set and subareas regarding reading, math, language, spelling, and multiple or other academic subjects; ability measures; affective outcomes; teacher and parent views; and single-subject designs. All of the estimated effects were positive and all were statistically significant except results from metaregressions involving affective outcomes. Characteristics of the publications, methodology, and sample were not systematically related to effect estimates. Effects showed little decline during maintenance, and effects for academic subjects were greater when students had more exposure to the programs. Estimated effects were educationally significant, moderate to large when using the traditional psychological benchmarks, and similar in magnitude to effect sizes that reflect performance gaps between more and less advantaged students.”

Stockard, Jean & Wood, Timothy & Coughlin, Cristy & Khoury, Caitlin. (2018). The Effectiveness of Direct Instruction Curricula: A Meta-Analysis of a Half Century of Research. Review of Educational Research. 88. 003465431775191. 10.3102/0034654317751919

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322332768_The_Effectiveness_of_Direct_Instruction_Curricula_A_Meta-Analysis_of_a_Half_Century_of_Research

Further, see Cristy Couglin’s: Research on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction programs: An updated meta-analysis at:

Coughlin C. (2011). Research on the effectiveness of Direct Instruction (NIFDI Technical Report 2011-4). Eugene, OR: National Institute for Direct Instruction.

https://www.nifdi.org/research/recent-research/technical-reports/1278-2011-1-research-syntheses-of-direct-instruction-outcomes-a-tertiary-review/file.html

Coughlin C. (2014). Outcomes of Engelmann’s Direct Instruction: Research syntheses. In Stockard J. (Ed.), The science and success of Engelmann’s Direct Instruction (pp. 25–54). Eugene, OR: NIFDI Press.

https://pages.uoregon.edu/jeans/SSDI_2014.pdf

(s) A lack of methodological soundness in the research

The What Works Clearinghouse rejects most of the Direct Instruction studies as not meeting their criteria for methodological soundness, and ignores those older than 20 years or so. There has been much criticism over the last 5 years (Briggs, 2008; Carter & Wheldall, 2008; Greene, 2010; Engelmann, 2008; McArthur, 2008; Reynolds, Wheldall, & Madelaine, 2009; Slavin, 2008; Stockard, 2008, 2010, 2013; Stockard & Wood, 2012, 2013). This criticism has included the criteria used and the inconsistent application of those criteria. For a detailed analysis as applied to WWC determinations about DI programs, see Jean Stockard’s addition analysis at: http://www.nifdi.org/documents-library/doc_download/270-2013-1-examining-the-what-works-clearinghouse-and-its-reviews-of-direct-instruction-programs

Most of the criticisms described above have been ably dealt with by Adams, (2004), Adams and Engelmann (1996), Adams and Slocum (2004), Barnes 91095), Carnine (1992, 1994), Ellis and Fouts (1997), Engelmann (2002), Kozloff (2009), and Tarver (1995, 1998).

Of the literature critical of the DI model, much is based on philosophical issues concerning reality and power; on theoretical issues such as the nature of the learning process, the role of teaching, or issues of measurement. Of the few studies in which alternative approaches have proved equivalent or superior, issues of treatment fidelity have arisen. It is rarely made clear whether the model described is the Direct Instruction model or a direct instruction clone of unknown rigour. Nor is it usually specified whether the teachers of any Direct Instruction program have been provided with the training required to ensure the programs are presented according to the presentation protocols.

A surprising feature of much of the criticism is the degree of venom present. It appears that in many of the papers, a great antipathy underpins the criticism. There is little pretense of objectivity, and the language is often emotional. One can’t help but wonder what it is about this model that evokes such ire. DI is a “harsh, inflexible, and depersonalizing approach” … I’d “like to see a stake driven in the heart of DISTAR” (Jalongo, 1999, p. 139).

The prevailing subtext seems to be that the writer doesn’t approve of the system because it contradicts the philosophy/beliefs of the writer. It must be wrongheaded because constructivism is right, and this system doesn’t fit with constructivism. In logic, this error is called begging the question. "It's rote, it's memorization, it's not good solid practice," says Karen Smith, associate director of the National Council of Teachers of English. "It goes against everything we think” (Duffrin, 1996, p.4).

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the criticisms is that relatively few dispute the effectiveness of the approach. It appears that, for most, the outcomes are not in dispute, but the process is not one with which many teachers feel comfortable. Thus, the dismissal of DI appears to place teacher comfort before student success.

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