7 ms·

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study

by kleiba 4y ago

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress? If anything, I keep hearing how kids today are doing worse than they did some generations ago. Well, it's probably difficult to even compare these different times, and certainly no-one would advocate going back to - god forbid - striking with a cane etc. But didn't anyone notice that in the course of changing the way kids are taught in school, their performance fell by the wayside? I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way? Can you blame everything on changed societal habits? TV, playstations and smart phones at an early age instead of books? Somehow I doubt it.

Vanderson 4y ago
Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...
- bluGill 4y ago
  I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.
  - Vanderson 4y ago
    Well, by "science based" my understanding is that they could prove the system worked to effectively teach kids to read with predictable results.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Sure, but all methods teach kids to read. Science of education should include effectiveness. Things such as how well they comprehend, how fast they read, what disabilities they have... note that the above list logically should be in conflict and society should debate the best method bases on the different measures to find good compromises.
bradleyjg 4y ago
From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it doesn’t sound like the field sees itself as a part of the scientific community at all. There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators. The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research. It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.
- Retric 4y ago
  There are mountains of education research out there. Some collages actually do focus on it, but the real goal is to prepare people for the workplace by jumping though whatever hoops are mandatory. Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked. Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…
  - jerry1979 4y ago
    I plan to do some volunteer work in teaching. What's the best way to find "the good stuff" in terms of educational research?
    - Retric 4y ago
      In general literature reviews are the best starting off point. However, I don’t know what if anything would be relevant to you. If you’re helping kids with dyslexia learn to read then that’s very different than normal tutoring etc. Really though research tends to have really narrow focus such as classroom lighting.
mschuster91 4y ago
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress? There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons: - teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely. - there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way". - closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless. - frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people. - there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own. - a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...
tgv 4y ago
Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics. We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  One of the downsides of credentialism seems to me that in squishier fields you can end up creating false-credentials where none should exist.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I think this comment should be removed, as it ranks below 7 on the Rob-Grant scale.
    - onionisafruit 4y ago
      You made me google rob-grant scale only to come back here and notice your handle. Good job, Rob.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        Now it needs to be a real scale.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, media, and even in game design. If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.
nicolas_t 4y ago
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress? My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad. This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...
michaelt 4y ago
> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read. Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics
Mezzie 4y ago
For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their administration and even the law. That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.") tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)
- darkerside 4y ago
  I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let your good points shine through
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    I'm not sure how to untangle the increasing polarization from the decaying of our social fabric and the inclusion of examples was primarily so people didn't take the points and warp them to only fit their ideology and turn them into more culture war bait + I think it's important to note that the media class on both major political sides in the US have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk fear. And to demonstrate that from what I've observed a lot of educational decisions are made from very emotional places - that is one major roadblock to treating education efforts scientifically. I felt like just saying 'it's the parents, admins, and media' wouldn't necessarily get across that the obstacles are not well-thought out or nefarious but rather a result of everybody being in a heightened state of constant emotion. Any advice? I definitely could have been less 'culture warry' about it, and you're right to call me on that. Thanks!
HopenHeyHi 4y ago
> I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way? You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the rooftops about this for generations. For example from another story posted here today: Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math. Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all? Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature. There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.
Khaine 4y ago
Did you listen to the episode where the teacher said, the theory might be true (phonics) but I ain't teaching it because fuck bush? This is the problem.
- JohnClark1337 4y ago
  A common trait in the US political system. "If the person on the other side of the aisle disagrees with me on points A, B, and C, but agrees with me on point D then I need to reevaluate my position on point D." I noticed this when the pandemic began. For about a week when we first went into lockdown my very conservative and very liberal friends were all worried about getting the virus and what the effects might be. But I knew even before it happened that this mentality wouldn't last and that eventually people would look around and go "wait, we're on the same side as THOSE people? Something isn't right!"
pitaj 4y ago
Just to comment on the specific issue at hand: The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question. And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation. That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.

by kleiba 4y ago

Vanderson 4y ago

Siegfried Engelmann from the University of Oregon developed a science based method for teaching reading. With simple ideas like making sure the letters were distinguishable, teaching the most common letters first, teaching the sounds the letters make before teaching the names of the letters, immediate feedback on reading mistakes, etc...

bluGill 4y ago
I've seen many "science based methods" in my lifetime, and they are contradictory. I am not an expert in the subject of education, which means I cannot evaluate what is really science based. I could do this of course - but my day job is as a programmer and when I'm done with that I just want to make sawdust or music, not do more research.
- Vanderson 4y ago
  Well, by "science based" my understanding is that they could prove the system worked to effectively teach kids to read with predictable results.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Sure, but all methods teach kids to read. Science of education should include effectiveness. Things such as how well they comprehend, how fast they read, what disabilities they have... note that the above list logically should be in conflict and society should debate the best method bases on the different measures to find good compromises.

bradleyjg 4y ago

From friends that have suffered through education degrees, it doesn’t sound like the field sees itself as a part of the scientific community at all. There’s a disproportionate focus on, frankly, ideological indoctrination. Even if you agree with the underlying ideologies that doesn’t seem like an ideal system for producing excellent educators. The little methodological trainings that do take place are often grounded in fads or cults of personality rather than scientifically proven effectiveness research. It sometimes feels as if the US as a society delegated the design of k-12 education to a few hundred experts, that turned out not be experts, and never checked back to see whether we had made a mistake.

Retric 4y ago
There are mountains of education research out there. Some collages actually do focus on it, but the real goal is to prepare people for the workplace by jumping though whatever hoops are mandatory. Research is largely ignored because what actually determines what’s used is politics not some rigorous validation of what works. We do a lot of standardized testing in the US not because it’s particularly useful, but because it’s been privatized and the only way for those companies to make even more money was even more tests. Which meant they needed to convince people more testing was needed, which worked. Luckily it’s shocking easy to educate most people, almost like young kids brains where setup to learn stuff…
- jerry1979 4y ago
  I plan to do some volunteer work in teaching. What's the best way to find "the good stuff" in terms of educational research?
  - Retric 4y ago
    In general literature reviews are the best starting off point. However, I don’t know what if anything would be relevant to you. If you’re helping kids with dyslexia learn to read then that’s very different than normal tutoring etc. Really though research tends to have really narrow focus such as classroom lighting.

mschuster91 4y ago

> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress? There isn't much, for a multitude of reasons: - teachers are overloaded with non-teaching related bullshit. Tons of standardized tests, school excursions, extracurricular activities, enforcing disciplinarian measures, working as an effective social worker for students in need, fundraising, classroom repairs, organizing basic supplies, filing exceptions for books to be in school libraries, dealing with absolutely moronic parents (both those that refuse to discipline their children and those who flood teachers in bullshit complaints because "muh religion"/"freedumb")... with the exception of discipline enforcement and the standardized test flood, none of this should be done by teachers but by admin staff. But there isn't much admin staff in schools, there isn't much assistance or building maintenance/cleaning/upkeep budget, and so teachers do it on their own just to keep the lights on, if barely. - there aren't many teachers in the first place, and the older ones often lack the motivation to further their own knowledge - some of them actively discourage new teachers from trying out what they learned in university because "we always did it this way". - closely related to the above: "concerned parent" activist groups disrupt that as well, for a multitude of their reasons. Some because "we had to go through the same shit in my time", "what doesn't kill you makes you harder" (I'm referring to corporal punishment here, which is shockingly legal for private schools in 48 states, in public schools in 18 states of which 15 still practice this barbarity [1]), some because they object to basic stuff such as sex ed on religious reasons... the list is endless. - frankly said, no one cares about education. Big Labor doesn't care, they need dumb grunts for slaughterhouses, farms, restaurants and other menial work who don't object to exploitation. The Army doesn't care, they need dumb grunts to send into the meat grinder. And there are enough privileged children where the parents take care for good private schools to fulfill the needs of employers needing actually intelligent people. - there are almost no feedback loops in the system other than the standardized tests, which are problematic on their own. - a lot of school students' performance is related to poverty and hunger - what few scraps of improvements have been made in the last decades have been long since eroded because poverty has exploded... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...

tgv 4y ago

Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics. We should take training teachers more seriously, pay them properly, and let them use time-honored methods until there's something that's truly better. A teacher, if close enough to the pupil, will be able to see what works and what doesn't.

AbrahamParangi 4y ago
One of the downsides of credentialism seems to me that in squishier fields you can end up creating false-credentials where none should exist.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I think this comment should be removed, as it ranks below 7 on the Rob-Grant scale.
  - onionisafruit 4y ago
    You made me google rob-grant scale only to come back here and notice your handle. Good job, Rob.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Now it needs to be a real scale.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, media, and even in game design. If it's not being used in schools it's not because it's ineffective.

nicolas_t 4y ago

michaelt 4y ago

> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read. Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics

Mezzie 4y ago

For teachers to be able to correct, there needs to be some level of social trust - parents need to trust that when a teacher corrects their child, they're doing it out of a desire to act in the child's best long-term interest: In loco parentis. The teachers also need to be backed up by their administration and even the law. That doesn't exist anymore. Which means even when teachers notice (and they have), they can't do anything about it because if they try they will be pilloried. The parents will freak out ("How DARE you correct my Jayden?"), the administration will bend immediately to avoid lawsuits ("You're absolutely right, Ms. Arsehole. Of course we'll keep this from happening again and move Jayden."), and if the media gets involved they have an incentive to turn it into a culture war piece that further erodes that trust: ("Teacher enforces hetero-patriarchial dress code standards on teen girl/Teacher shuts down student's FREE SPEECH by not letting him rant about how awesome Andrew Tate is for 15 minutes.") tl;dr: Social conditions must be met for parent apes to accept non-parent apes helping to raise their children. These conditions are not presently being met; there is an assumption of hostility rather than good-intent. Nobody is going to let anyone A/B test kids because nobody would ever let their kid be in the group that didn't do as well/nefarious intent would be ascribed. (They're experimenting on our kids! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!)

darkerside 4y ago
I wish you would abstain from some of the rhetoric and let your good points shine through
- Mezzie 4y ago
  I'm not sure how to untangle the increasing polarization from the decaying of our social fabric and the inclusion of examples was primarily so people didn't take the points and warp them to only fit their ideology and turn them into more culture war bait + I think it's important to note that the media class on both major political sides in the US have very similar incentives to act poorly and stoke knee-jerk fear. And to demonstrate that from what I've observed a lot of educational decisions are made from very emotional places - that is one major roadblock to treating education efforts scientifically. I felt like just saying 'it's the parents, admins, and media' wouldn't necessarily get across that the obstacles are not well-thought out or nefarious but rather a result of everybody being in a heightened state of constant emotion. Any advice? I definitely could have been less 'culture warry' about it, and you're right to call me on that. Thanks!

HopenHeyHi 4y ago

> I mean, even if half of the above claim were true, and some ~37 percent of 4th graders couldn't read properly, that would already be outrageous. But surely, that didn't happen over-night -- where were the corrective measures along the way? You are in deep denial. People have been shouting from the rooftops about this for generations. For example from another story posted here today: Frustrated by high failure rates in eighth-grade algebra, San Francisco Unified decided in 2015 to delay algebra till ninth grade and place low, average and high achievers in the same classes. The goal was to improve achievement for black and Hispanic students, preparing more for advanced math. Of course the opposite happened. Now these high schoolers test at a 5th grade level. Who on earth made this call? What qualified them to just decide this? What was their thought process and motivation? Now that it backfired in spectacular fashion will there be any repercussions for them at all? Corrective measures are apparently not possible when issues get politicized. I think the US simply has too much money which causes inverse incentives around problems of this nature. There is like, zero chance, this could happen in Korea for example (I am not Korean btw least you accuse me of jingoism) -- such people would be shunned from society for fucking up like this once.

Khaine 4y ago

Did you listen to the episode where the teacher said, the theory might be true (phonics) but I ain't teaching it because fuck bush? This is the problem.

JohnClark1337 4y ago
A common trait in the US political system. "If the person on the other side of the aisle disagrees with me on points A, B, and C, but agrees with me on point D then I need to reevaluate my position on point D." I noticed this when the pandemic began. For about a week when we first went into lockdown my very conservative and very liberal friends were all worried about getting the virus and what the effects might be. But I knew even before it happened that this mentality wouldn't last and that eventually people would look around and go "wait, we're on the same side as THOSE people? Something isn't right!"

pitaj 4y ago

Just to comment on the specific issue at hand: The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question. And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation. That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.