Psychological Effects of the “Open Classroom”

Since the first descriptive reports of the progressive teaching approach in English primary schools appeared in the American press in the mid-1960's, there has been a vast outpouring of literature on what has come to be called education, or the classroom. Many of the early reports provided rich and vivid descriptions of what was going on in the English schools and stressed how much more humane and more sensitive to realities of child development this approach to teaching seemed to be. Other writings analyzed the open education movement in the context of its historical precedents and psychological/philosophical underpinnings and compared the development of the approach in England and the United States. Still others, with a more practical orientation, provided specific advice on how to implement open education in American schools. As interest in open education increased, so did demands for systematic evaluative research on its effects, to the point where there now exists a fairly sizable body of work on academic and psychological effects of open classroom teaching. In 1975, I reviewed the relevant literature and located over 100 such studies, which I summarized in a monograph published the next year by the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation (Horwitz, 1976). In late 1977, in preparation for this paper, I searched the literature again and located nearly 100 additional studies which had either appeared in the intervening two years or been inadvertently overlooked in my previous review. The outpouring of research continues, but for all the amassing of data, there is still by no means a clear answer to the question of whether or