7 ms·

The Effect of Computer-Assisted Learning on Students’ Long-Term Development

79 points by gandalfgeek 6y ago

sandspar 6y ago
It seems silly to have 1,000 teachers who range from first best to 1,000th best all teaching roughly the same number of students a year. Why not give the top 10 best teachers all the resources they need then let them teach everyone?
- rixrax 6y ago
  Monoculture? I don’t think teaching is binary. There are of course universally really awesome teachers, as well as terrible ones. But between them, there are all kinds of teachers with all kinds of teaching styles and crazy experiments. It may not be equal for everyone, but I think it’s much better than monoculture.
  - hnracer 6y ago
    Then include heterogeneity of approach in your ranking system. Even if we do this we still have a rank order from which we can select the N best and give them a scalable platform through which they can reach large numbers, and be better off than under the archaic approach of a bijective mapping from random teacher X to Y students (Y less than 200), where the quality of X is probably dominated in a Pareto sense by any single teacher in the top N. Caveat here that I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I would also say that this fits well with the part of the teaching process that can be scaled with no downsides, eg lectures. But TA sessions etc can't be scaled as well and such an approach wouldn't fit.
  - Jipazgqmnm 6y ago
    Just a little empiricism: During my studies, 95 % of the teaching was somewhere between "not good" and "horrible / comically bad". There were just one or two persons in the whole faculty known for good teaching. This was acknowledged by all students I came in touch with. --> There is a kind of teaching that is uniquely perceived as "good" among the people I came in touch with. The same holds for teachers known for really bad teaching. That written, teaching _was_ mostly perceived binary. There was fairly little overlap where teaching styles were perceived "good" from some and "bad" from others.
- mulmen 6y ago
  I think that's like asking why nine women can't make a baby in a month. Who defines best? Why not give all the resources to one teacher?
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Students (or their families) could choose the definition of best they wanted. Some teachers are better at adding value for less intelligent pupils, some better at pushing the more gifted, some best for the hardworking, some best for the ill-motivated ... take your pick. It can even come down to relatively inane factors like one teacher's diction being too difficult for some to follow but fine for others. Re your 2nd question: bus factor. And the same answer as the first - that you can have different definitions of best depending on the pupil.
- iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
  Why not the top 1? I don’t know tbh. Feels wrong though. Firstly, bus factor. Then robustness. How do you train new teachers? How do they get experience? Then theres diversity of thought, where do you get that from if everyone has the same progenitor of thoughts? Then what happens politically when you give such a few number of people such power. Would fundamentally change politics. What abuses of power? Let the wrong person into those few teachers and give them lots of control over millions of children's day to day lives? Thats a lot of children to screw up if you get it wrong. That aside, it goes against my personal belief about how the world and humans work so I can’t get down with it.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Not at all. One of the major concerns in schools is student to teacher ratio and small classroom sizes are considered a plus. All the well-meaning but naive plans to turn education into mass media would with up with all the wealthy zip codes having teachers and everyone else relying on glorified youtube. At this point, if there’s an education problem where technology would be useful, it’s probably something subtle like collaborating to publish an affordable textbook as a way to break monopoly pricing.
- watwut 6y ago
  Good teaching of kids is not lecture - relationship and reacting to kids as individuals matter and does not scale.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
crispyambulance 6y ago
There are lots of factors at play here, but it's interesting to note the student-teacher ratios the paper describes. The under-performing Chinese rural schools are at ~17, and they say that urban Chinese schools are at ~12. 17 is roughly typical student teacher ratio in US public schools, regardless of status. In the US a ratio of 12 or less is common in elite private schools. I was expecting that the CAL program they implemented was what is known as an "Inverted Classroom". It's a learning system where students view recorded (or live) lectures by master teachers as "homework", and then use classroom time with a regular teacher to practice/drill/explore what they've learned-- not unlike a college recitation session with a TA. But that was not the case in the Chinese CAL study. Instead... > In our context, however, remote learning happened in the classroom under the direct supervision of local teachers, therefore limiting distractions and procrastination.
- abhinav22 6y ago
  Yep - from this I take it to be a more unique model that doesn’t sacrifice as much of the social aspects of learning, as the inverted classroom would where there is a feeling of detachment during the viewing of the recordings.
abhinav22 6y ago
What I have grown to appreciate recently is the social aspect of human learning. For a lot of us, perhaps most, being in a social environment greatly assists with learning. Hence having small classrooms where students and teachers can interact with each other. I found the importance of the social aspect most vividly in webinars: - A live webinar and a pre recorded webinar where attendees only passively watch and do not participate are exactly the same except for the feeling of being “live” - That said, individuals are many more times likely to dial into a live webinar than a pre recorded one —- it’s because of the social aspect I ran a series of webinars at work and saw these principles play out first hand (I did a write up on how to organize effective webinars for anyone interested: https://link.medium.com/Bpq4EH8Ymcb https://link.medium.com/Bpq4EH8Ymcb) I feel we will learn more from an average teacher who we socially interact with than the best teacher from who we are not socially connected. There’s something about humans being social creatures that we best accept knowledge in a social sphere. I say this as an anti social person who prefers to read textbooks than watch videos or talk to people :D But through the years I realize I am more in the minority. This is why meetings in companies are very important - for us hackers it sounds like a waste of time - but for a lot of the genera populace, a meeting is an easier way to absorb information because of the social aspects to it. Many people I think struggle to learn anything without an interactive session
- powerapple 6y ago
  A good teacher do so much more than an average teacher. I remember I was in school, and had a few good teachers. They are brilliant. They teach well, you learn faster, and you get hooked with the subject. My chemistry teacher on the other hand was mediocre, I had no interests in chemistry at all, and I did really bad. There were many students in my class did well in Chemistry, and many of us did well in Physics. The difference is teaching. Of course, social aspects is important, when you can have everything, having everything is the best you should aim for. The study of this shows a solution to schools which couldn't attract good teachers due to location, fund or something else, it is not applicable to general schools and general teaching.
  - abhinav22 6y ago
madballster 6y ago
"which connected China’s best teachers "... I wonder why they choose the best teachers for this type study? Wouldn't a randomized, average sample produce more objective results?
aaron695 6y ago
> Second, the program installed 264,905 satellite receiving sets, comprising satellite antennas, satellite TV equipment, computers, and other related devices. No internet in a region -> internet is a huge important jump. I would expect of A) DVD's B) DVD's and Internet C) DVD's and Internet and Computer Rooms B) Would win. C) Would get into the Wests issue of installing useless tech that just distracts students, even in rural China in 2004. I can't find if they compare these installed models?
modzu 6y ago
to be clear, the "assistance" the computer is providing is to connect rural learners to teachers. the title is a bit ambiguous
ajarmst 6y ago
I am extremely dubious that they can properly control for other variables to so blithely offer up "Computer-Assisted Learning" as the cause of any changes, even for values of "Computer-Assisted Learning" limited to "State-sanctioned and enforced computer-assisted learning with novel infrastructure and tools from a world-class expert as experienced by a culturally and socially uniform population of rural Han Chinese students studied for only four years."
- ajarmst 6y ago
  And, of course, I wonder if recent behaviour by the PRC should encourage us to be confident that reports about the success of multi-billion dollar government initiatives should be considered entirely trustworthy.

79 points by gandalfgeek 6y ago

It seems silly to have 1,000 teachers who range from first best to 1,000th best all teaching roughly the same number of students a year. Why not give the top 10 best teachers all the resources they need then let them teach everyone?

rixrax 6y ago
Monoculture? I don’t think teaching is binary. There are of course universally really awesome teachers, as well as terrible ones. But between them, there are all kinds of teachers with all kinds of teaching styles and crazy experiments. It may not be equal for everyone, but I think it’s much better than monoculture.
- hnracer 6y ago
  Then include heterogeneity of approach in your ranking system. Even if we do this we still have a rank order from which we can select the N best and give them a scalable platform through which they can reach large numbers, and be better off than under the archaic approach of a bijective mapping from random teacher X to Y students (Y less than 200), where the quality of X is probably dominated in a Pareto sense by any single teacher in the top N. Caveat here that I'm no expert in pedagogy, but I would also say that this fits well with the part of the teaching process that can be scaled with no downsides, eg lectures. But TA sessions etc can't be scaled as well and such an approach wouldn't fit.
- Jipazgqmnm 6y ago
  Just a little empiricism: During my studies, 95 % of the teaching was somewhere between "not good" and "horrible / comically bad". There were just one or two persons in the whole faculty known for good teaching. This was acknowledged by all students I came in touch with. --> There is a kind of teaching that is uniquely perceived as "good" among the people I came in touch with. The same holds for teachers known for really bad teaching. That written, teaching _was_ mostly perceived binary. There was fairly little overlap where teaching styles were perceived "good" from some and "bad" from others.
mulmen 6y ago
I think that's like asking why nine women can't make a baby in a month. Who defines best? Why not give all the resources to one teacher?
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Students (or their families) could choose the definition of best they wanted. Some teachers are better at adding value for less intelligent pupils, some better at pushing the more gifted, some best for the hardworking, some best for the ill-motivated ... take your pick. It can even come down to relatively inane factors like one teacher's diction being too difficult for some to follow but fine for others. Re your 2nd question: bus factor. And the same answer as the first - that you can have different definitions of best depending on the pupil.
iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
Why not the top 1? I don’t know tbh. Feels wrong though. Firstly, bus factor. Then robustness. How do you train new teachers? How do they get experience? Then theres diversity of thought, where do you get that from if everyone has the same progenitor of thoughts? Then what happens politically when you give such a few number of people such power. Would fundamentally change politics. What abuses of power? Let the wrong person into those few teachers and give them lots of control over millions of children's day to day lives? Thats a lot of children to screw up if you get it wrong. That aside, it goes against my personal belief about how the world and humans work so I can’t get down with it.
coffeefirst 6y ago
Not at all. One of the major concerns in schools is student to teacher ratio and small classroom sizes are considered a plus. All the well-meaning but naive plans to turn education into mass media would with up with all the wealthy zip codes having teachers and everyone else relying on glorified youtube. At this point, if there’s an education problem where technology would be useful, it’s probably something subtle like collaborating to publish an affordable textbook as a way to break monopoly pricing.
watwut 6y ago
Good teaching of kids is not lecture - relationship and reacting to kids as individuals matter and does not scale.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

crispyambulance 6y ago

There are lots of factors at play here, but it's interesting to note the student-teacher ratios the paper describes. The under-performing Chinese rural schools are at ~17, and they say that urban Chinese schools are at ~12. 17 is roughly typical student teacher ratio in US public schools, regardless of status. In the US a ratio of 12 or less is common in elite private schools. I was expecting that the CAL program they implemented was what is known as an "Inverted Classroom". It's a learning system where students view recorded (or live) lectures by master teachers as "homework", and then use classroom time with a regular teacher to practice/drill/explore what they've learned-- not unlike a college recitation session with a TA. But that was not the case in the Chinese CAL study. Instead... > In our context, however, remote learning happened in the classroom under the direct supervision of local teachers, therefore limiting distractions and procrastination.

abhinav22 6y ago
Yep - from this I take it to be a more unique model that doesn’t sacrifice as much of the social aspects of learning, as the inverted classroom would where there is a feeling of detachment during the viewing of the recordings.

abhinav22 6y ago

What I have grown to appreciate recently is the social aspect of human learning. For a lot of us, perhaps most, being in a social environment greatly assists with learning. Hence having small classrooms where students and teachers can interact with each other. I found the importance of the social aspect most vividly in webinars: - A live webinar and a pre recorded webinar where attendees only passively watch and do not participate are exactly the same except for the feeling of being “live” - That said, individuals are many more times likely to dial into a live webinar than a pre recorded one —- it’s because of the social aspect I ran a series of webinars at work and saw these principles play out first hand (I did a write up on how to organize effective webinars for anyone interested: https://link.medium.com/Bpq4EH8Ymcb https://link.medium.com/Bpq4EH8Ymcb) I feel we will learn more from an average teacher who we socially interact with than the best teacher from who we are not socially connected. There’s something about humans being social creatures that we best accept knowledge in a social sphere. I say this as an anti social person who prefers to read textbooks than watch videos or talk to people :D But through the years I realize I am more in the minority. This is why meetings in companies are very important - for us hackers it sounds like a waste of time - but for a lot of the genera populace, a meeting is an easier way to absorb information because of the social aspects to it. Many people I think struggle to learn anything without an interactive session

powerapple 6y ago
A good teacher do so much more than an average teacher. I remember I was in school, and had a few good teachers. They are brilliant. They teach well, you learn faster, and you get hooked with the subject. My chemistry teacher on the other hand was mediocre, I had no interests in chemistry at all, and I did really bad. There were many students in my class did well in Chemistry, and many of us did well in Physics. The difference is teaching. Of course, social aspects is important, when you can have everything, having everything is the best you should aim for. The study of this shows a solution to schools which couldn't attract good teachers due to location, fund or something else, it is not applicable to general schools and general teaching.
- abhinav22 6y ago

madballster 6y ago

"which connected China’s best teachers "... I wonder why they choose the best teachers for this type study? Wouldn't a randomized, average sample produce more objective results?

aaron695 6y ago

> Second, the program installed 264,905 satellite receiving sets, comprising satellite antennas, satellite TV equipment, computers, and other related devices. No internet in a region -> internet is a huge important jump. I would expect of A) DVD's B) DVD's and Internet C) DVD's and Internet and Computer Rooms B) Would win. C) Would get into the Wests issue of installing useless tech that just distracts students, even in rural China in 2004. I can't find if they compare these installed models?

modzu 6y ago

to be clear, the "assistance" the computer is providing is to connect rural learners to teachers. the title is a bit ambiguous

ajarmst 6y ago

I am extremely dubious that they can properly control for other variables to so blithely offer up "Computer-Assisted Learning" as the cause of any changes, even for values of "Computer-Assisted Learning" limited to "State-sanctioned and enforced computer-assisted learning with novel infrastructure and tools from a world-class expert as experienced by a culturally and socially uniform population of rural Han Chinese students studied for only four years."

ajarmst 6y ago
And, of course, I wonder if recent behaviour by the PRC should encourage us to be confident that reports about the success of multi-billion dollar government initiatives should be considered entirely trustworthy.