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There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" wou

There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applying them makes concrete differences in knowledge acquisition. If I was to make a guess, I'd say that the 'effortful' component the author discusses is most aligned with something commonly called the "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. A silly but apt example would be watching a youtube video on solving a rubik's cube, then having to transform the state of a real rubik's cube using your new knowledge. This idea, and related ones, continue to be discussed at length by those who develop curriculum for educational institutions, and at a more meta-level, those who develop lessons for students who will later write a curriculum! I see a few links in sibling comments to Aviation learning, Youtube, PBS, but not to documents produced by any university on theory of learning. Perhaps they need to better link their work for smart hn readers to find.

whartung 3y ago
Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once. Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it. Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  Agreed. And it builds muscle memory. It's the difference between saying "Of course I can walk a mile" and actually walking a mile.
  - blackbear_ 3y ago
    Thanks to muscle memory, I have a probability of about 50% of mistakenly typing "int" instead of "in" whenever I write text in human languages, lol
    - michaelcampbell 3y ago
      Same here. I must type "int he" as much or more as "in the".
- tobr 3y ago
  Beginner programmers are also often uncomfortable with the sheer amount of typing required to do anything. They might try to use copy and paste as a shortcut. So practicing just the typing, rather than both thinking and typing at the same time and feeling like the slow typing is limiting your thinking, is probably a good idea for that reason too.
- eimrine 3y ago
  I use to teach my computer science students to touchtype in Dvorak, despite of our mother language does not even use Latin letters. Usually it takes 6 to 10 hours if there is no a strong QWERTY habit. I am sure they are gonna game these few hours in their first year of actively using keyboard.
wdutch 3y ago
Thanks for taking the time to write this. Could you recommend any reading material for someone interested in theory of learning?
vsnf 3y ago
> In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". Is this a reference to some specific university?
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  I don't really understand it either, but in my alma mater, a random small public liberal arts college, it is the case that the building closest to the CS building was the education building.
- hiisukun 3y ago
  Hah -- nope, although the other person replying to you is a funny example, and it's true for at least one university near me. It was more of an indirect comment about forgetting to search for fields of expertise outside your own, despite potential proximity.
leidenfrost 3y ago
There's a free course in Coursera called "Learning How to Learn" and it radically changed how I view learning and education in general. I wish I knew about this when I was a teen. If I take a valuable nugget of information about it, is that real learning comes through experience: using the information, recalling it fron memory and manipulating it in some way. This goes from just writing what you hear to a personal project. Anything behavioral, more than just receiving and thinking, helps to actually learn.
- corysama 3y ago
  With no qualifications at all, I occasionally fantasize about starting my own school. One of the rules of my imaginary school is that a full 33% of the time, K through 12, is to be spent on meta-cognition. Not simply “study habits”. Mindfulness, physical education, anything that helps bring focus and motivation counts. I find it crazy that the educational system expects children to develop in this axis on their own almost entirely because they are simply expected to do so. I went to well-regarded schools and it’s generous to say they put a minimal amount of effort into teaching us how and why to learn. A frank assessment would be that they hardly seemed aware of the topic…
  - galaxyLogic 3y ago
    One tidbit worth mentioning I think is that learning something even if you think you don't know why you should learn it, is that you will learn how to learn. You can then apply that learning to anything. But you are right kids should be taught to see that learning itself is the problem.
  - papandada 3y ago
    I have a friend who tutors and teaches music privately, and he runs his sessions very much like this.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Right because applying it to a real problem means you have to go though the effort of solving that problem. Solving a problem always takes effort, else it would not be a "problem". Again the effort seems to be the key here.
Tomte 3y ago
You mean Education Science? I'm currently studying it (besides my day job), probably writing my bachelor's thesis next semester. Unfortunately, in my experience there are several shortcomings of the field (or at least typical bachelor's master's programs outside teachers's preparation, which is separate in Germany). They love to talk about interdisciplinarity, and will even call out neuroscience and psychology often. In practice, it's mostly a social sciences field, and as such has been taken over by constructivism. Now, while learning is obviously (IMO) a constructive activity, they will "explain" everything with "handwave... social construction... handwave", while dismissing e.g. neuroscience aspects as "not a learning theory" and thus not worthy of discussion. The statistical sophistication is very, very low. It's not all linear regression, but mostly, and even when it isn't there is no (even implicit) discussion of causality, just adding all variables (what McElreath calls "causal salad).
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  Check out programs and communities of practice in the field of “learning engineering.” Strong attention to controlled experiments, data mining, human-centered design, among other things. Carnegie Mellon is one center.
- _glass 3y ago
  I do my PhD in management as part of organization studies, I know some good folk doing education. So don't be too disappointed in the beginning, it might be just your profs, or your uni. Just search quickly with Google Scholar, and there is this Fischer et al. (2010) that looks like a good summary responding to your comment. If my impression from my colleagues is correct, UK seems to be a good place for grad school in education. Just from an epistemological standpoint there is Mahadevan (2020) and Romani et al. (2018) where you can see where the field is going. Fischer, K. W., Goswami, U., Geake, J., & Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience. (2010). The future of educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4(2), 68-80. Mahadevan, J. (2020). Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(2), 228-251. Romani, L., Barmeyer, C., Primecz, H., & Pilhofer, K. (2018). Cross-cultural management studies: state of the field in the four research paradigms. International Studies of Management & Organization, 48(3), 247-263.
dmvdoug 3y ago
Yeah, that was painful. How does memory work? Me, teacher who took graduate school classes on educational psychology: he’s going to talk about short-term memory, etc. now. Him: NEURONS! Also, the article never mentioned the one absolutely knock down, finding that has been confirmed over and over again as effective for learning (or at least remembering): spaced repetition.
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  Spaced repetition takes effort, and causes pain. It is tedious. So it still fits in with the idea proposed. I believe you need to be conscious of what you are trying to learn and if it is tedious, then you are conscious of it because tedious means you experience some strain. You will remember it better because it was painful. Just speculating but it makes sense to my layman brain.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Your response prompts for me a point I left out above: there’s major ambiguity here about “learning.” Learning isn’t one thing. Memorizing definitions of vocabulary words isn’t the same thing as explaining how you might apply a word in different contexts (think categorization or classification). This is one of the major things I spend lots of time on as a history teacher. Ok, great, awesome, we can kinda say what a revolution is. Uh. Uh oh. Why do we have revolutions that are French and Scientific? Those don’t sound super similar. Hey, wait, let me tell y’all about how I got on the internet when I was your age. I had to plug my computer into a wall, dial something, and a box inside my computer would screech at me. Y’all carry the internet around in your hands everywhere you go. Is that a revolution? Etc. That kind of learning is very different than looking a word up in a dictionary. And there are other kinds (procedural learning, which turns out to be actually rather different from other kinds).
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    Spaced repetition happens everyday outside of a "sit at a desk and learn" setup and is plenty efficient without effort and pain. The obvious one is seeing again and again a concept so much you end up remembering it, like the Dunning Kreuger effect (or to take it darker, being able to recipe an ad you've seen hundreds of time) If anything, I'd argue the pain and effort can be negative it will still work.
wisty 3y ago
Schools of education have a very poor reputation for a reason. There's analysis done on the "teacher quality" (based on student results) and the amount of teacher training (at these schools). There's basically zero difference between an emergency qualified teacher with no education qualifications, and someone with a masters or PhD of education. Quote - https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001059_Teacher_Training.pdf https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001059_Teacher... > Our results suggest that only two of the forms of teacher training we study influence productivity. First, content-focused teacher professional development is positively associated with productivity in middle and high school math. Second, more experienced teachers appear more effective in teaching elementary math and reading and middle school math. There is no evidence that either pre-service (undergraduate) training or the scholastic aptitude of teachers influences their ability to increase student achievement. The evidence is that teachers learn literally nothing (or overall nothing - maybe they learn some good things and some harmful myths) in teacher college. They might learn a bit of math, which helps them teach math. IIRC it's also found that doing a PhD in education can be helpful in teaching classes with a heavy essay writing focus. It's not surprising, since a lot of what gets taught in teacher college is junk psychology from the 1930s, and the essays of the kind of people who do a PhD in education. Here's a few of the biases that they tend to have (IMO): * Education experts did OK at school, and think that the fundamentals are boring because their white upper-middle-class parents helped them learn phonics and the times tables. * Education experts are often not actually good at much other than essay writing and year 10 math, and don't see the point of hard sciences like pyschology. * There's plenty of smart people who go into education, but they do it because they want to teach, not be a researcher. I could go through some of the poor content in education degrees (like the hero of education experts Vygotsky, who I'm not convinced many have even read other than through n-th hand sources where people write "the student is thus about to construct knowledge through scaffolded tasks in the zone of proximal development (Vygoskly, 1930something)", but you'd be lucky to find many teachers who agree on what any of that means (other than be common sense "don't make it too hard to follow"). Is it really a wonder that Cletus, who got a job in rural school in Alabama with no more qualifications than being able to write his name correctly teaches just as well (according to research) as someone with a PhD in education? The good research is in psychology departments - people who study the science of learning are generally pretty well informed on it.
irrational 3y ago
My Masters degree was in Instructional Psychology! I hardly ever see it referenced as a field of study.
scotty79 3y ago
> where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them That's probably why some school subjects that lack this component largely or entirely like history, geography or literature are so hard to learn.
scotty79 3y ago
> "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. Hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand.
barry-cotter 3y ago
> There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". Yes, people know. Education schools aren’t held in low esteem by social scientists or the educated public by reason of lack of familiarity. They can’t even manage a detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Note I did not say large. The effect of an education degree on teacher effectiveness is not reliably distinguishable from zero. > It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness > Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, the Gates Foundation spent many tens of millions attempting to quantify ‘teacher effectiveness’ and basically concluded that it’s not measurable. Instead, they produced a holistic set of observable behaviors that are generally correlated with ‘great teaching’ - which may be useful, but isn’t the same thing. This is not to say I really disagree with you about the quality of education schools, but knocking them for failing to produce a measurable impact on teacher effectiveness doesn’t resonate with me when we don’t have robust tools for measuring teacher effectiveness in the first place.
rbanffy 3y ago
My first job was as one of the programmers in an interdisciplinary team that was mostly made of field experts (healthcare) and cognitive psychologists that designed games to make learning more effective. I was probably one of the handful people who were actually paid to program Apple IIs in Brazil. It was a remarkable experience to work at a applied research centre early in my career (I was in my second year in college) that had a lasting impact on everyone involved.
nonethewiser 3y ago
It’s good to re-examine things without imposing existing frameworks.
Ozzie_osman 3y ago
There's a book called "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" that is an excellent read on the science behind learning for lay-people (like myself) who want practical tips based in actual science. It also argues that easier/faster learning is often worse. Harder learning lasts longer, and a big part of it is what they refer to as finding ways to "interrupt the natural process of forgetting". With this in mind, interleaved/ varied practice, spaced repetition, reflection, are all techniques that both lead to deeper understanding and better retention.
seventhtiger 3y ago
I'm skeptical of how the results of the educational field apply to the individual. They deal with very specific constraints because of classroom economy. If your stated goal is to get every child in this room to read, then you're wildly out of alignment with the needs of the child who could be reading the classics by the end of the year. Gifted and accelerated programs only alleviate the problem by a fixed amount by adding one additional more intense tier, which every child competes for to improve their university application profile. Any person who tried to teach a child one to one for a short period of time learns how unfit school is. The only limit to their learning is the adult's energy and skill. While school is the product of several rounds of the lowest slowest denominator. Kings and princes used to be taught by tutors they form long term relationships with. This is still the best way. School is the equivalent of feeding the masses dog food to keep them compliant.
- yterdy 3y ago
  This is not just for "elite" children, also. A good mentor-mentee relationship is how you get the best out of students in non-academic fields, too. It's why apprenticeship systems developed. One of the earlier posts decried "constructivism" in research, but I don't know how you get around the fact that most students are not, even cannot even be allowed to reach their full potential in whatever way that applies to them, because society requires us to fill certain roles, which that potential may not apply to. Educational outcomes are socially-constructed; I'd even go so far as to say that this social need is more predictive than inborn potential and even effort.
- nickd2001 3y ago
  When it comes to reading I believe the best way to help a child learn is simply for parents (or as you also suggest, teachers, if its smaller group / 1 to 1) to (1) take the time and effort to read to kids, and (2) find high quality children's fiction that's interesting and motivating for the child to read themselves. Usually can be found at the library. or second-hand children's classics. So free or cheap. Our daughter is an excellent reader because she's a "bookworm", and her younger brother looks to be going the same way. She is hooked on fantasy fiction, he more on non-fiction about animals, space, dinosaurs. Some people wonder how they're such good readers. My answer is always. - give them books that make reading a joy and fun, then people want to, then they learn. To be honest, its incredible how schools manage to demotivate kids and they end up as "slow readers". Barring some kind of disability, I don't think that's a natural state for a child.

whartung 3y ago

Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once. Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it. Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
Agreed. And it builds muscle memory. It's the difference between saying "Of course I can walk a mile" and actually walking a mile.
- blackbear_ 3y ago
  Thanks to muscle memory, I have a probability of about 50% of mistakenly typing "int" instead of "in" whenever I write text in human languages, lol
  - michaelcampbell 3y ago
    Same here. I must type "int he" as much or more as "in the".
tobr 3y ago
Beginner programmers are also often uncomfortable with the sheer amount of typing required to do anything. They might try to use copy and paste as a shortcut. So practicing just the typing, rather than both thinking and typing at the same time and feeling like the slow typing is limiting your thinking, is probably a good idea for that reason too.
eimrine 3y ago
I use to teach my computer science students to touchtype in Dvorak, despite of our mother language does not even use Latin letters. Usually it takes 6 to 10 hours if there is no a strong QWERTY habit. I am sure they are gonna game these few hours in their first year of actively using keyboard.

wdutch 3y ago

Thanks for taking the time to write this. Could you recommend any reading material for someone interested in theory of learning?

vsnf 3y ago

> In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". Is this a reference to some specific university?

oh_sigh 3y ago
I don't really understand it either, but in my alma mater, a random small public liberal arts college, it is the case that the building closest to the CS building was the education building.
hiisukun 3y ago
Hah -- nope, although the other person replying to you is a funny example, and it's true for at least one university near me. It was more of an indirect comment about forgetting to search for fields of expertise outside your own, despite potential proximity.

leidenfrost 3y ago

There's a free course in Coursera called "Learning How to Learn" and it radically changed how I view learning and education in general. I wish I knew about this when I was a teen. If I take a valuable nugget of information about it, is that real learning comes through experience: using the information, recalling it fron memory and manipulating it in some way. This goes from just writing what you hear to a personal project. Anything behavioral, more than just receiving and thinking, helps to actually learn.

corysama 3y ago
With no qualifications at all, I occasionally fantasize about starting my own school. One of the rules of my imaginary school is that a full 33% of the time, K through 12, is to be spent on meta-cognition. Not simply “study habits”. Mindfulness, physical education, anything that helps bring focus and motivation counts. I find it crazy that the educational system expects children to develop in this axis on their own almost entirely because they are simply expected to do so. I went to well-regarded schools and it’s generous to say they put a minimal amount of effort into teaching us how and why to learn. A frank assessment would be that they hardly seemed aware of the topic…
- galaxyLogic 3y ago
  One tidbit worth mentioning I think is that learning something even if you think you don't know why you should learn it, is that you will learn how to learn. You can then apply that learning to anything. But you are right kids should be taught to see that learning itself is the problem.
- papandada 3y ago
  I have a friend who tutors and teaches music privately, and he runs his sessions very much like this.
galaxyLogic 3y ago
Right because applying it to a real problem means you have to go though the effort of solving that problem. Solving a problem always takes effort, else it would not be a "problem". Again the effort seems to be the key here.

Tomte 3y ago

You mean Education Science? I'm currently studying it (besides my day job), probably writing my bachelor's thesis next semester. Unfortunately, in my experience there are several shortcomings of the field (or at least typical bachelor's master's programs outside teachers's preparation, which is separate in Germany). They love to talk about interdisciplinarity, and will even call out neuroscience and psychology often. In practice, it's mostly a social sciences field, and as such has been taken over by constructivism. Now, while learning is obviously (IMO) a constructive activity, they will "explain" everything with "handwave... social construction... handwave", while dismissing e.g. neuroscience aspects as "not a learning theory" and thus not worthy of discussion. The statistical sophistication is very, very low. It's not all linear regression, but mostly, and even when it isn't there is no (even implicit) discussion of causality, just adding all variables (what McElreath calls "causal salad).

dr_dshiv 3y ago
Check out programs and communities of practice in the field of “learning engineering.” Strong attention to controlled experiments, data mining, human-centered design, among other things. Carnegie Mellon is one center.
_glass 3y ago
I do my PhD in management as part of organization studies, I know some good folk doing education. So don't be too disappointed in the beginning, it might be just your profs, or your uni. Just search quickly with Google Scholar, and there is this Fischer et al. (2010) that looks like a good summary responding to your comment. If my impression from my colleagues is correct, UK seems to be a good place for grad school in education. Just from an epistemological standpoint there is Mahadevan (2020) and Romani et al. (2018) where you can see where the field is going. Fischer, K. W., Goswami, U., Geake, J., & Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience. (2010). The future of educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4(2), 68-80. Mahadevan, J. (2020). Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(2), 228-251. Romani, L., Barmeyer, C., Primecz, H., & Pilhofer, K. (2018). Cross-cultural management studies: state of the field in the four research paradigms. International Studies of Management & Organization, 48(3), 247-263.

dmvdoug 3y ago

Yeah, that was painful. How does memory work? Me, teacher who took graduate school classes on educational psychology: he’s going to talk about short-term memory, etc. now. Him: NEURONS! Also, the article never mentioned the one absolutely knock down, finding that has been confirmed over and over again as effective for learning (or at least remembering): spaced repetition.

galaxyLogic 3y ago
Spaced repetition takes effort, and causes pain. It is tedious. So it still fits in with the idea proposed. I believe you need to be conscious of what you are trying to learn and if it is tedious, then you are conscious of it because tedious means you experience some strain. You will remember it better because it was painful. Just speculating but it makes sense to my layman brain.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  Your response prompts for me a point I left out above: there’s major ambiguity here about “learning.” Learning isn’t one thing. Memorizing definitions of vocabulary words isn’t the same thing as explaining how you might apply a word in different contexts (think categorization or classification). This is one of the major things I spend lots of time on as a history teacher. Ok, great, awesome, we can kinda say what a revolution is. Uh. Uh oh. Why do we have revolutions that are French and Scientific? Those don’t sound super similar. Hey, wait, let me tell y’all about how I got on the internet when I was your age. I had to plug my computer into a wall, dial something, and a box inside my computer would screech at me. Y’all carry the internet around in your hands everywhere you go. Is that a revolution? Etc. That kind of learning is very different than looking a word up in a dictionary. And there are other kinds (procedural learning, which turns out to be actually rather different from other kinds).
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  Spaced repetition happens everyday outside of a "sit at a desk and learn" setup and is plenty efficient without effort and pain. The obvious one is seeing again and again a concept so much you end up remembering it, like the Dunning Kreuger effect (or to take it darker, being able to recipe an ad you've seen hundreds of time) If anything, I'd argue the pain and effort can be negative it will still work.

wisty 3y ago

Schools of education have a very poor reputation for a reason. There's analysis done on the "teacher quality" (based on student results) and the amount of teacher training (at these schools). There's basically zero difference between an emergency qualified teacher with no education qualifications, and someone with a masters or PhD of education. Quote - https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001059_Teacher_Training.pdf https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001059_Teacher... > Our results suggest that only two of the forms of teacher training we study influence productivity. First, content-focused teacher professional development is positively associated with productivity in middle and high school math. Second, more experienced teachers appear more effective in teaching elementary math and reading and middle school math. There is no evidence that either pre-service (undergraduate) training or the scholastic aptitude of teachers influences their ability to increase student achievement. The evidence is that teachers learn literally nothing (or overall nothing - maybe they learn some good things and some harmful myths) in teacher college. They might learn a bit of math, which helps them teach math. IIRC it's also found that doing a PhD in education can be helpful in teaching classes with a heavy essay writing focus. It's not surprising, since a lot of what gets taught in teacher college is junk psychology from the 1930s, and the essays of the kind of people who do a PhD in education. Here's a few of the biases that they tend to have (IMO): * Education experts did OK at school, and think that the fundamentals are boring because their white upper-middle-class parents helped them learn phonics and the times tables. * Education experts are often not actually good at much other than essay writing and year 10 math, and don't see the point of hard sciences like pyschology. * There's plenty of smart people who go into education, but they do it because they want to teach, not be a researcher. I could go through some of the poor content in education degrees (like the hero of education experts Vygotsky, who I'm not convinced many have even read other than through n-th hand sources where people write "the student is thus about to construct knowledge through scaffolded tasks in the zone of proximal development (Vygoskly, 1930something)", but you'd be lucky to find many teachers who agree on what any of that means (other than be common sense "don't make it too hard to follow"). Is it really a wonder that Cletus, who got a job in rural school in Alabama with no more qualifications than being able to write his name correctly teaches just as well (according to research) as someone with a PhD in education? The good research is in psychology departments - people who study the science of learning are generally pretty well informed on it.

irrational 3y ago

My Masters degree was in Instructional Psychology! I hardly ever see it referenced as a field of study.

scotty79 3y ago

> where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them That's probably why some school subjects that lack this component largely or entirely like history, geography or literature are so hard to learn.

scotty79 3y ago

> "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. Hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand.

barry-cotter 3y ago

> There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". Yes, people know. Education schools aren’t held in low esteem by social scientists or the educated public by reason of lack of familiarity. They can’t even manage a detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Note I did not say large. The effect of an education degree on teacher effectiveness is not reliably distinguishable from zero. > It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness > Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775710001755 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

germinalphrase 3y ago
For what it’s worth, the Gates Foundation spent many tens of millions attempting to quantify ‘teacher effectiveness’ and basically concluded that it’s not measurable. Instead, they produced a holistic set of observable behaviors that are generally correlated with ‘great teaching’ - which may be useful, but isn’t the same thing. This is not to say I really disagree with you about the quality of education schools, but knocking them for failing to produce a measurable impact on teacher effectiveness doesn’t resonate with me when we don’t have robust tools for measuring teacher effectiveness in the first place.

rbanffy 3y ago

My first job was as one of the programmers in an interdisciplinary team that was mostly made of field experts (healthcare) and cognitive psychologists that designed games to make learning more effective. I was probably one of the handful people who were actually paid to program Apple IIs in Brazil. It was a remarkable experience to work at a applied research centre early in my career (I was in my second year in college) that had a lasting impact on everyone involved.

nonethewiser 3y ago

It’s good to re-examine things without imposing existing frameworks.

Ozzie_osman 3y ago

There's a book called "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" that is an excellent read on the science behind learning for lay-people (like myself) who want practical tips based in actual science. It also argues that easier/faster learning is often worse. Harder learning lasts longer, and a big part of it is what they refer to as finding ways to "interrupt the natural process of forgetting". With this in mind, interleaved/ varied practice, spaced repetition, reflection, are all techniques that both lead to deeper understanding and better retention.

seventhtiger 3y ago

I'm skeptical of how the results of the educational field apply to the individual. They deal with very specific constraints because of classroom economy. If your stated goal is to get every child in this room to read, then you're wildly out of alignment with the needs of the child who could be reading the classics by the end of the year. Gifted and accelerated programs only alleviate the problem by a fixed amount by adding one additional more intense tier, which every child competes for to improve their university application profile. Any person who tried to teach a child one to one for a short period of time learns how unfit school is. The only limit to their learning is the adult's energy and skill. While school is the product of several rounds of the lowest slowest denominator. Kings and princes used to be taught by tutors they form long term relationships with. This is still the best way. School is the equivalent of feeding the masses dog food to keep them compliant.

yterdy 3y ago
This is not just for "elite" children, also. A good mentor-mentee relationship is how you get the best out of students in non-academic fields, too. It's why apprenticeship systems developed. One of the earlier posts decried "constructivism" in research, but I don't know how you get around the fact that most students are not, even cannot even be allowed to reach their full potential in whatever way that applies to them, because society requires us to fill certain roles, which that potential may not apply to. Educational outcomes are socially-constructed; I'd even go so far as to say that this social need is more predictive than inborn potential and even effort.
nickd2001 3y ago
When it comes to reading I believe the best way to help a child learn is simply for parents (or as you also suggest, teachers, if its smaller group / 1 to 1) to (1) take the time and effort to read to kids, and (2) find high quality children's fiction that's interesting and motivating for the child to read themselves. Usually can be found at the library. or second-hand children's classics. So free or cheap. Our daughter is an excellent reader because she's a "bookworm", and her younger brother looks to be going the same way. She is hooked on fantasy fiction, he more on non-fiction about animals, space, dinosaurs. Some people wonder how they're such good readers. My answer is always. - give them books that make reading a joy and fun, then people want to, then they learn. To be honest, its incredible how schools manage to demotivate kids and they end up as "slow readers". Barring some kind of disability, I don't think that's a natural state for a child.