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I haven't seen anything serious in the field of education. Education can and should be a science. There should be experiments to determine what works and what d

I haven't seen anything serious in the field of education. Education can and should be a science. There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. Instead, we have 5 different preschool pedagogies, 5 different elementary pedagogies, and 5 different secondary pedagogies, and nobody bothering to figure out what works at scale.

davidgay 3y ago
> There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems: - how do you get the research funded? - how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long? - how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?
tgv 3y ago
You're right-ish, but... the problems of educational sciences are plenty, but most importantly the impossibility to run proper experiments, and the almost complete lack of fundamental, reliable knowledge about human cognition and learning. The bottom line is that they have no idea how learning works, nor how teaching works. Their findings should not be used as evidence. Only the largest effects could be cautiously used as guidelines for gradual and reversible change.
- lordnacho 3y ago
  There's 200 countries to examine. Should be plenty of ways to get data to analyse. For some reason it seems to be minimal how much comparison we get. Whether comparisons we do get end up being a kind of contest, like PISA.
  - tgv 3y ago
    So we assign each difference to national differences. Or language. Or some other part of the environment. If you could get say 50 countries to do a double blind experiment with two different teaching methods, you might make use of the scale. But even then you can only conclude something if all results have (more or less) the same effect size, and what do you win? Little. You can't even generalize over countries, since it wasn't a representative sample. And that's ignoring all the aforementioned factors, and the near certainty of a less than flawless execution that will definitely screw up the results. So I don't think "200 countries" will work. Such approaches have been tried with other, easier manipulations, like dieting, and it frequently turns out that interpreting the data isn't straight-forward. It isn't physics.
    - lordnacho 3y ago
      It isn't physics, but the bar is also lower. I agree there are issues with doing the comparison.
      - tgv 3y ago
        I wouldn't say the bar isn't lower. There are so many more variables than in physics, and you have so much less control over them, yet we don't really want less reliable conclusions. If you want a physics metaphor: it's like dark matter: no idea what it is, where to begin, contradicting theories all around. But this is right under your nose. You've taken part in it, and if you work at uni, you still do.

davidgay 3y ago

> There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems: - how do you get the research funded? - how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long? - how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?

tgv 3y ago

You're right-ish, but... the problems of educational sciences are plenty, but most importantly the impossibility to run proper experiments, and the almost complete lack of fundamental, reliable knowledge about human cognition and learning. The bottom line is that they have no idea how learning works, nor how teaching works. Their findings should not be used as evidence. Only the largest effects could be cautiously used as guidelines for gradual and reversible change.

lordnacho 3y ago
There's 200 countries to examine. Should be plenty of ways to get data to analyse. For some reason it seems to be minimal how much comparison we get. Whether comparisons we do get end up being a kind of contest, like PISA.
- tgv 3y ago
  So we assign each difference to national differences. Or language. Or some other part of the environment. If you could get say 50 countries to do a double blind experiment with two different teaching methods, you might make use of the scale. But even then you can only conclude something if all results have (more or less) the same effect size, and what do you win? Little. You can't even generalize over countries, since it wasn't a representative sample. And that's ignoring all the aforementioned factors, and the near certainty of a less than flawless execution that will definitely screw up the results. So I don't think "200 countries" will work. Such approaches have been tried with other, easier manipulations, like dieting, and it frequently turns out that interpreting the data isn't straight-forward. It isn't physics.
  - lordnacho 3y ago
    It isn't physics, but the bar is also lower. I agree there are issues with doing the comparison.
    - tgv 3y ago
      I wouldn't say the bar isn't lower. There are so many more variables than in physics, and you have so much less control over them, yet we don't really want less reliable conclusions. If you want a physics metaphor: it's like dark matter: no idea what it is, where to begin, contradicting theories all around. But this is right under your nose. You've taken part in it, and if you work at uni, you still do.