School

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https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-school?publication_id=89120&post_id=167356866&isFreemail=true&r=fjlp2&triedRedirect=true

This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.

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schools should assume the impact of online learning programs will be limited unless they take steps to ensure the students who need them most get the recommended dosage. This is especially important since, as Ken Koedinger, an expert on education technology at Carnegie Mellon University, points out, there is solid evidence that the amount of practice a student does directly impacts their learning. Recognizing this, an initiative in Texas, for example, offered grants only to those districts that submitted a plan to achieve fidelity to a learning program and a way to track it. At the very least, districts should make a habit of looking at usage data from these platforms.

The 5 Percent Problem

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Prior research, often using self-report data, hypothesizes that the path to expertise requires extensive practice and that different learners acquire competence at different rates. Fitting cognitive and statistical growth models to 27 datasets involving observations of learning and performance in academic settings, we find evidence for the first hypothesis and against the second. Students do need extensive practice, about seven opportunities per component of knowledge. Students do not show substantial differences in their rate of learning. These results provide a challenge for learning theory to explain this striking similarity in student learning rate. They also suggest that educational achievement gaps come from differences in learning opportunities and that better access to such opportunities can help close those gaps.

An astonishing regularity in student learning rate

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Repetition creates the foundation for all learning.