Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"[1]
As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?
As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.
Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ?
OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill.
The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.
What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.
PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart.
I remember Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) talking about this a few years ago. He believed that the current accepted method of teaching - students attending lectures and sitting in classrooms getting knowledge from teachers, then later doing homework alone trying to apply it - needs to be inverted. Lectures, presentations, textbooks can all be online and automated. Teaching resources, limited as they are, are much better spent helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help. Of course this brings us to the more fundamental question - are schools more for learning or daycare?
> helping students specifically when they are stuck and need more personalized help.
This is where most learning resources fall short of ideal - if you work on a problem without human guidance, you can often either work through it in whole and learn, or check out the solution if you get stuck, have a short "ah, of course!" moment and not learn much at all. A tutor can sort of "debug" through questions and targeted hints where you're going wrong, and thus make the concepts stick in a more lasting way.
I wonder if there's potential for some sort of digital learning medium which actively tries to "figure out" where the student's misunderstandings and gaps lie and addresses them in a more targeted way (optional hints are a first step, but there must be better).
I learned basic algebra from an analog learning medium (a "choose your own adventure" style book) that attempted to diagnose and address misunderstandings and gaps.
Sounds somewhat familiar, but the difference to programmed learning (at least as discussed in that article) is that the book contained error paths as well as the happy path.
No more memories, sorry. That was way back when phone conversations were over wires and television was wireless.
The chain of concepts to be taught was linear, and for each concept there would be a few paragraphs of instruction, followed by a set question with multiple choice ("if you think the answer is X, turn to page Y") set. A correct choice would lead to the next concept, while the available incorrect choices would each lead to material clearing up that presumably common misunderstanding[1] (leaving the reader with uncommon gaps to reread the intro?).
I can no longer remember if the clarifications included check-up questions or just looped back to the original.
[1] In book form, this approach wouldn't work well if the concepts had long-tails of possible misconceptions. Online, that could be less of an issue.
Most online forums have an "RTFM" or FAQ approach to beginners. Reddit's LearnPython sub has a ton of "explain OOP/Recursion/debug my beginner code/restart game/etc." style questions, and while there is a FAQ, it's not enforced very hard. Almost the opposite of StackOverflow.
As a result, there are a huge number of people learning themselves by explaining to other people, practising by solving other people's problems, and answering the beginner questions over and over.
I think things like that have got to be part of the future of learning online, instead of dumping what you know into a FAQ and pulling the ladder up after you, closing the community from outsiders.
Mandatory tutoring seems unrealistic and probably wouldn't yield quality, but I do think that some kind of scaled tutoring "norm" would be incredibly valuable to society. Just as Khan Academy has revolutionised explanations of complex topics (resolving the ambiguities from school), scaled tutoring in which everyone participates could augment traditional teaching with soft skills, conversation, expansive exploration of worldly topics, and specific technical help.
Imagine a norm where ~everyone, in some way, relays knowledge and experience to youth, freeing youth from the segregation of school. It's always been odd to me that we separate ourselves (especially in western culture) from people of a different age. There's not as much integration between children and adults (outside of formalised schooling) as there could be. This separation seems to limit the transfer of knowledge but also the transfer of culture. And I think it also prevents bridges of commonality and empathy from forming, further entrenching homogeneity and aversion to difference.
It's worth asking ourselves: what would a society look like if we ~all engaged in the education of our young?
I find this doubly interesting in the context of homeschooling.
Often the parent's goals are to make the student as capable of being self-taught as possible. After the early years, the parent essentially steps into the role of tutor. You look for shortcomings and help the student step through those knowledge gaps. Otherwise the student can go as quickly or slowly through the material as they need to
Not that this scales, we'd have to look elsewhere for that, but interesting to see this function in a small community.
As a tutor, my goal was to identify gaps and misunderstandings. Consider: how can you give a driver helpful directions if you don't know where they are?
As a student, I noticed that teachers are routinely ambiguous in ways they cannot understand. And mostly, these alternative interpretations work... mostly. So when they cause problems many layers later, the learner can see no clues to the cause. But an attentive tutor can.
Subtle gaps and misunderstanding have an outsize effect, and maybe could account for 2σ?
OTOH teachers accidentally trained me to disentangle ambiguity, and that is a valuable real-world skill.
The mentor relationship has magic in it and I remember the moment I learnt certain things. So maybe social aspects contribute too, as wiki suggests.
What to do? Like mandatory military service, mandatory tutoring service. We appear to be wasting obscene quanities of human capital. Imagine the economic productivity unleashed by a more fully realized workforce.
PS did pc receive one-on-one tutoring? Intelligent parents often tutor their children, conferring this outsize headstart.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem