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I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in so

I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. Instead of using the tech start up mentality, I think a lot more benefit could be done by helping teachers build relationships with there students & having open dialogue on what they like & what they don't. I get that this means throwing more money at lower teacher/student ratios which is hard to do but I think it would have a greater impact than tech. I say this as someone whose life & thoughts towards learning did a 180 once they were introduced to the internet & computers in the 90s. Yes, computers can change the lesson plan & personalize per student faster & better than a teacher. But at what cost? While multiple techniques exists, are there that many that a teacher can't try multiple out on there students and record how they respond? I feel if we had reasonable classroom sizes of 10:1 this would be fairly easy to do. I also feel we could cut down the amount of info we jam into students heads & focus on learning the more important concepts. I believe Bill Gates & many others have started preaching this as well. You don't need to learn everything but there are some core skills that we don't spend enough time on that will benefit us much longer.

germinalphrase 7y ago
For point of reference, I teach high school English in a middle class suburb in a large midwestern city. I teach five classes at a time (typically a mix of two or three different courses) and class sizes are usually 30-35+.
kuu 7y ago
You can complement the PC with some other traditional stuff
Kalium 7y ago
> I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. This sounds like a nice, clearly stated, and eminently testable hypothesis. Do you have any such data?
dalbasal 7y ago
To some extent, computer-aided learning might help reduce student/teacher ratios in practice. 2 hrs independent learning to 1hr in groups 1/3 the size... for example. While I agree that more teachers per student is highly effective, it's also expensive... and will unavoidably end up becoming cost-limited below the ideal level. As a total side note, I wonder what other, potentially healthy changes can be made if personalized learning can be made to work well. For example, I suspect that homogeneous age classes are not ideal. Spending half your life in a room with 40 other 10 year olds isn't something that happens outside of modern school systems. It's somewhat unatural. Maybe mixed-age classes can become possible again.
nugget 7y ago
I had exposure to a range of different educational environments growing up, including Stanford's EPGY online/distance learning courses. My experience was that a great teacher with a small class (<15 kids) was preferable to online courses. But great teachers are rare, and so are small class sizes. I found most K-12 teachers to be mediocre, unmotivated, and burdened with large classes (>25 kids in high school). Given that reality, online learning (or just self education) was more efficient most of the time.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue... You're right. And that DOES WORK. It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" (https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn). The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics. This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.
- mr_crankypants 7y ago
  Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement. I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one. I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests. I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify. To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.

germinalphrase 7y ago

For point of reference, I teach high school English in a middle class suburb in a large midwestern city. I teach five classes at a time (typically a mix of two or three different courses) and class sizes are usually 30-35+.

kuu 7y ago

You can complement the PC with some other traditional stuff

Kalium 7y ago

> I'm 100% for using data to help personalize learning but I strongly believe using a computer for even half of the learning leads to large negative results in social skills & physical health. This sounds like a nice, clearly stated, and eminently testable hypothesis. Do you have any such data?

dalbasal 7y ago

To some extent, computer-aided learning might help reduce student/teacher ratios in practice. 2 hrs independent learning to 1hr in groups 1/3 the size... for example. While I agree that more teachers per student is highly effective, it's also expensive... and will unavoidably end up becoming cost-limited below the ideal level. As a total side note, I wonder what other, potentially healthy changes can be made if personalized learning can be made to work well. For example, I suspect that homogeneous age classes are not ideal. Spending half your life in a room with 40 other 10 year olds isn't something that happens outside of modern school systems. It's somewhat unatural. Maybe mixed-age classes can become possible again.

nugget 7y ago

I had exposure to a range of different educational environments growing up, including Stanford's EPGY online/distance learning courses. My experience was that a great teacher with a small class (<15 kids) was preferable to online courses. But great teachers are rare, and so are small class sizes. I found most K-12 teachers to be mediocre, unmotivated, and burdened with large classes (>25 kids in high school). Given that reality, online learning (or just self education) was more efficient most of the time.

crispyambulance 7y ago

> ...build relationships with their students & having open dialogue... You're right. And that DOES WORK. It's why the most elite schools in the world use classroom setups like "Harkness Method" (https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn). The problem is that it's expensive, class sizes are a fraction of what public schools have to serve. Instruction is "mastery-based" which means that individual students don't move forward in the curriculum until they've demonstrated mastery of prerequisite foundational topics. This is part of the reason why kids from wealthy families can end up in elite colleges. Connections help, of course, but the kids are well-taught. For them, learning disabilities are just obstacles that can be worked around, fall-behind one semester because of teenage stuff? No problem, they get tutored out of that rut. The same kinds of problems in an overcrowded and overwhelmed public school end with the student being stuck academically and not prepared for college.

mr_crankypants 7y ago
Perhaps Harkness could be modified to be less expensive to implement. I had one truly good math class during my secondary education, and the way the teacher conducted things sounds a lot like this. Small groups, sitting around a table, talking about the subject. The overall class size was much larger, of course. So what we had was a class subdivided into smaller groups, with the teacher circulating among the tables, spending maybe 10 minutes at a time at each one. I suspect the real problem with this approach, at least from an American perspective, is that it's not easy enough to instrument for data collection. You can't measure "mastery", so instead you measure performance on multiple-choice questions. And then you tie funding to goals related to those tests. . . at which point, no matter what you _want_ the teacher's job to be, what they're really being paid to do is train kids to regurgitate information on multiple-choice tests. I'm a professional data scientist, and, ironically, being one has resulted in me becoming a deep skeptic of the movement toward data-driven everything. "Data" is understood to be quantitative data, and not everything can be studied quantitatively, so it leads to people habitually deciding, intentionally or not, for better or for worse, to re-frame all their activities in ways that make them easier to quantify and micro-quantify. To take another example, there's a whole lot of well-established research out there indicating what the best way to pick up a second language is. And you'll never see any of this knowledge being applied to language learning classes in American public schools, because its implications about how we should teach second languages are almost universally incompatible with the teachers' mandate to always be quantifying.