Beyond "lesson study": Comparing two ways of facilitating the grasp of some economic concepts

During three discussion sessions, two groups of five teachers each developed a shared lesson plan, one for each group, for the teaching of a difficult economic concept, the incidence of a sales tax. In one of the groups (the lesson study group), the lesson plan was based on the pool of the participants' experience and intuition in accordance with the Japanese "lesson study". In the other group (the learning study group), the lesson plan was based on the participants' experience and intuition as made sense of in terms of a learning theory introduced by a researcher in accordance with the idea of "the learning study", in which the Japanese lesson study is combined with a "design experiment". The students' understanding was probed after the series of lessons. In the classes of the lesson study group, fewer than 30% of the students developed a good grasp of the concept, compared to over 70% of the students in the learning study group. The differences in learning outcomes are interpreted in the light of observed differences in how the concept was dealt with in the different classrooms.