6 ms·

Learning For Mastery (1968) [pdf]

158 points by jackdoe 3y ago

abdellah123 3y ago
This is a marvelous piece of analysis of the "current" traditional educational landscape. Seems like things only got worse over 40 years ... Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the school and actually requires a great deal of political will and power. "Education" must guide politics and have power over it. And such a deep change in perspective and "economics" is just not conceivable within the realms of the modern society as it is now. It requires a deep change in method and people. And the latter circles back to education, which makes it a hopeless loop ... The only way to break it is to do "education" outside the realms of school, to target a "minority" (to be practical not to segregate), and to fight and work for a change that will make education central and at the top of society. P.S: By Education, I don't merely mean instruction. It's a holistic and profound change in a human being ... that it aims to create
- eru 3y ago
  > Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the school and actually requires a great deal of political will and power. "Education" must guide politics and have power over it. Isn't the problem that we are mixing education and politics in the first place? We should probably separate education and the state just as much as we separate church and state. (The touch of politics seldom enhances the quality of anything. The further your chosen activity is from politics, the easier it is to improve quietly improve it. Eg even just to stick to learning: Wikipedia and StackOverflow are great. And so are lots of great how-to books and freely available videos. They are as far removed from politics as it gets.)
  - abdellah123 3y ago
    I meant the needs of the education should guide "political" decisions. A simple example is that the education budget (percentage) should be in two digits!!
    - eru 3y ago
      And I am saying that there shouldn't be an education item in the government's budget in the first place. (Just to be clear, I'm all for giving poor people money, so they can spend it as they see fit. Be that education or food or entertainment etc. By contrast, rich people don't need government hand-outs.)
      - gausswho 3y ago
        Disassembling public education would have substantial societal externalities. If education is anything you want it to be, why not graduate from DraftKings Precocious Kids HIgh School?
        eru 3y ago
        Sorry, I don't understand the second sentence. Yes, I agree that public education has substantial costs. Both direct costs to the victims and societal externalities. Disassembling the monster would hopefully stop some of them.
        gausswho 3y ago
        So if up to an individual, what do you think they would choose for their education if there were no mandates agreed upon by their government. DraftKings is a gambling titan that could offer a very profitable option.
        gyulai 3y ago
        I do not at all think that, if government wasn't in the business of setting those standards, the standards would turn out lower. Reputation would follow the institutions, and graduating from an institution that set lows standards wouldn't have any signalling power to prospective employers, so students wouldn't want to enroll there. What you actually see in countries that have both a private and public education system is that the private institutions compete on the grounds of who sets the highest standards, not on who offers the most riskless opportunity to students to get the degree, irrespective of how low an effort they put in or how incapable they are. If you're talking of a huge number of small institutions in combination with high mobility, then maybe reputation at the level of the individual institution wouldn't do the trick, but you would probably see certification and quality assurance agencies pop up to establish brands and enforce standards around them.
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    If you look at everything from "Monicagate" (not the Clinton one!) to the recent moderator strike over AI-generated answers, StackOverflow is not as apolitical as you suggest? But to engage with your main point - I agree, and we can take Germany as an example here. During the Nazi period, everything was put in service of politics, so in math class you'd answer questions like "calculate how many extra hard-working German families we could support if we the state didn't have to spend so-and-so-many Reichsmarks per Jew". Since 1945, there's been a strong tradition to keep politics out of math and science education in Germany, and this seems to be mostly holding even in face of "social justice" pressure. Keeping politics out of "is Phonics a good teaching method?" would also have been a great idea in the English-speaking world.
    - atoav 3y ago
      I teach at a German University and I have never in a decade perceived even the slightest scintilla of any student creating "social justice pressure" in any of my or the classes of my collegues. Whenever there was a social justice topic that made the waves, it was typically about some prof who legitimately acted like full blown asshole and thought everybody else has to put up with their ego — if anything disrupted education in that case, it was them, and the student's demands were basically a totally understandable demand to not have that guys ego get into the way of their education. As I am working at a liberal art school you would think I probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't. Concerns about "social justice"-people putting pressure on us always come from people who got no idea and are out of the educational field for a while. As of now I am nearly convinced that this is probably a collective mind virus that is 99% fiction (and the 1% where it is true has so little impact it doesn't even matter).
      - adolph 3y ago
        > As I am working at a liberal art school you would think I probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Could you define politics here? I don't see how you could separate "politics" from education other than by just not teaching history or anything that touches on social issues.
    - eru 3y ago
      I am talking about separating school and state (just like many countries separate church and state). If the school (or church) wants to be political, that's fine. As long as they don't force anyone to attend their lectures (or sermons), nor ask the taxpayer to keep them afloat.
- throwaway71271 3y ago
  > 40 years Sadly its almost 60 years :) Education tendencies seem to be incredibly latent and they have huge inertia. For example in The Netherlands the amount of languages you speak used to be a measure for intelligence, so most schools teach 4 languages from the age of 12 (out of 9 subject 4 are languages). In the same time, languages are the easiest to test, and also the easiest to progress a mass of people. The easiest thing to test (and show improvement and etc) in the bloom pyramid is memory. You surely have people trying their hardest, like Julius Miller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9psf01ldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9psf01ldo (1964) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3szmCF8-L8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3szmCF8-L8 but the system does not seem to respond to them/ But it seems the education institution is not trying to teach people anything.
totetsu 3y ago
Is this a counterpoint to the openai ai for education discussion?
isaacfrond 3y ago
tl;dr if you provide each student with the appropriate kind and quality of instruction and the amount of time available for learning then the majority of students will achieve mastery.
- thechao 3y ago
  I had two of my kids in a mastery school. The school didn't "do" mastery very, well, but it's a lot better than public school. Students learn different parts of a subject at different rates. By tuning the time the kids had to learn a sub-subject, they could fully master the subject, and at an accelerated pace compare to public school. If I could get Khan-academy + peer socialization + baby sitting "in one room", I think that'd be ideal.
drhodes 3y ago
A more legible copy with selectable text: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED053419.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED053419.pdf
- dang 3y ago
  Ok, let's change to that from http://www.researchforteachers.org.uk/sites/default/files/Docs/Bloom%20(1968)%20Learning%20for%20Mastery_0.pdf http://www.researchforteachers.org.uk/sites/default/files/Do... above. Thanks!
gyulai 3y ago
"researchforteachers dot org dot uk" sounds like it might be an interesting organization that I'd like to know more about, but the domain root is just a login mask. Does anyone have details on who is behind and what else they offer to the general public besides a scanned PDF of an interesting article?
- akoshodi 3y ago
  You can do a Google/Bing search for PDFs on the domain like this: filetype:pdf site:researchforteachers.org.uk for more PDFs from the site.
begueradj 3y ago
There is also "The Improvement of the Mind" book, by Isaac Watts. It even shaped one of the great minds of science: Michael Faraday
- djmips 3y ago
  "Though caution and slow assent will guard you against frequent mistakes and retractions; yet you should get humility and courage enough to retract any mistake, and confess an error." - it took me a while to figure this one out on my own...
trane_project 3y ago
My implementation of mastery learning (along with other related ideas): https://github.com/trane-project/trane/ https://github.com/trane-project/trane/ It bothered me enough that there was not something like this already available, when the idea seemed so simple, that I ended up doing it myself. The user experience is not very polished yet, but I managed to turn the courses in here https://improviseforreal.com/learning-materials https://improviseforreal.com/learning-materials into courses for this software that can teach you ear training and to improvise on any instrument in all keys, all modes, and most common chord progression. Currently, I am doing it for piano, but I've only reached about 15% of the total jam tracks so far. Obviously, I am not distributing the tracks myself. I am pretty sure the main issue is that there's no one funding implementing these ideas. We've known about mastery learning, spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. for decades, but it's not all been put together into a coherent system. Something like https://mathacademy.com/ https://mathacademy.com/ is similar, but it's not open sourced and cannot be used to create your own materials. No need for LLMs or anything fancier to be involved when there's so much low-hanging fruit that's not been implemented yet. The core of my software is just a depth-first search over a graph, lol.
cglee 3y ago
I'm embarrassed to say that even after spending nearly a decade operating a mastery-based software engineering school, I've only just heard about this paper now. And having read it just now, I'm feeling better than ever about mastery-based education. Here's our take on mastery if anyone is interested: https://medium.com/launch-school/mastery-based-learning-209540907760 https://medium.com/launch-school/mastery-based-learning-2095...

158 points by jackdoe 3y ago

This is a marvelous piece of analysis of the "current" traditional educational landscape. Seems like things only got worse over 40 years ... Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the school and actually requires a great deal of political will and power. "Education" must guide politics and have power over it. And such a deep change in perspective and "economics" is just not conceivable within the realms of the modern society as it is now. It requires a deep change in method and people. And the latter circles back to education, which makes it a hopeless loop ... The only way to break it is to do "education" outside the realms of school, to target a "minority" (to be practical not to segregate), and to fight and work for a change that will make education central and at the top of society. P.S: By Education, I don't merely mean instruction. It's a holistic and profound change in a human being ... that it aims to create

eru 3y ago
> Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the school and actually requires a great deal of political will and power. "Education" must guide politics and have power over it. Isn't the problem that we are mixing education and politics in the first place? We should probably separate education and the state just as much as we separate church and state. (The touch of politics seldom enhances the quality of anything. The further your chosen activity is from politics, the easier it is to improve quietly improve it. Eg even just to stick to learning: Wikipedia and StackOverflow are great. And so are lots of great how-to books and freely available videos. They are as far removed from politics as it gets.)
- abdellah123 3y ago
  I meant the needs of the education should guide "political" decisions. A simple example is that the education budget (percentage) should be in two digits!!
  - eru 3y ago
    And I am saying that there shouldn't be an education item in the government's budget in the first place. (Just to be clear, I'm all for giving poor people money, so they can spend it as they see fit. Be that education or food or entertainment etc. By contrast, rich people don't need government hand-outs.)
    - gausswho 3y ago
      Disassembling public education would have substantial societal externalities. If education is anything you want it to be, why not graduate from DraftKings Precocious Kids HIgh School?
      - eru 3y ago
        Sorry, I don't understand the second sentence. Yes, I agree that public education has substantial costs. Both direct costs to the victims and societal externalities. Disassembling the monster would hopefully stop some of them.
        gausswho 3y ago
        So if up to an individual, what do you think they would choose for their education if there were no mandates agreed upon by their government. DraftKings is a gambling titan that could offer a very profitable option.
        gyulai 3y ago
        I do not at all think that, if government wasn't in the business of setting those standards, the standards would turn out lower. Reputation would follow the institutions, and graduating from an institution that set lows standards wouldn't have any signalling power to prospective employers, so students wouldn't want to enroll there. What you actually see in countries that have both a private and public education system is that the private institutions compete on the grounds of who sets the highest standards, not on who offers the most riskless opportunity to students to get the degree, irrespective of how low an effort they put in or how incapable they are. If you're talking of a huge number of small institutions in combination with high mobility, then maybe reputation at the level of the individual institution wouldn't do the trick, but you would probably see certification and quality assurance agencies pop up to establish brands and enforce standards around them.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  If you look at everything from "Monicagate" (not the Clinton one!) to the recent moderator strike over AI-generated answers, StackOverflow is not as apolitical as you suggest? But to engage with your main point - I agree, and we can take Germany as an example here. During the Nazi period, everything was put in service of politics, so in math class you'd answer questions like "calculate how many extra hard-working German families we could support if we the state didn't have to spend so-and-so-many Reichsmarks per Jew". Since 1945, there's been a strong tradition to keep politics out of math and science education in Germany, and this seems to be mostly holding even in face of "social justice" pressure. Keeping politics out of "is Phonics a good teaching method?" would also have been a great idea in the English-speaking world.
  - atoav 3y ago
    I teach at a German University and I have never in a decade perceived even the slightest scintilla of any student creating "social justice pressure" in any of my or the classes of my collegues. Whenever there was a social justice topic that made the waves, it was typically about some prof who legitimately acted like full blown asshole and thought everybody else has to put up with their ego — if anything disrupted education in that case, it was them, and the student's demands were basically a totally understandable demand to not have that guys ego get into the way of their education. As I am working at a liberal art school you would think I probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't. Concerns about "social justice"-people putting pressure on us always come from people who got no idea and are out of the educational field for a while. As of now I am nearly convinced that this is probably a collective mind virus that is 99% fiction (and the 1% where it is true has so little impact it doesn't even matter).
    - adolph 3y ago
      > As I am working at a liberal art school you would think I probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
- hooverd 3y ago
  Could you define politics here? I don't see how you could separate "politics" from education other than by just not teaching history or anything that touches on social issues.
  - eru 3y ago
    I am talking about separating school and state (just like many countries separate church and state). If the school (or church) wants to be political, that's fine. As long as they don't force anyone to attend their lectures (or sermons), nor ask the taxpayer to keep them afloat.
throwaway71271 3y ago
> 40 years Sadly its almost 60 years :) Education tendencies seem to be incredibly latent and they have huge inertia. For example in The Netherlands the amount of languages you speak used to be a measure for intelligence, so most schools teach 4 languages from the age of 12 (out of 9 subject 4 are languages). In the same time, languages are the easiest to test, and also the easiest to progress a mass of people. The easiest thing to test (and show improvement and etc) in the bloom pyramid is memory. You surely have people trying their hardest, like Julius Miller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9psf01ldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9psf01ldo (1964) or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3szmCF8-L8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3szmCF8-L8 but the system does not seem to respond to them/ But it seems the education institution is not trying to teach people anything.

totetsu 3y ago

Is this a counterpoint to the openai ai for education discussion?

isaacfrond 3y ago

tl;dr if you provide each student with the appropriate kind and quality of instruction and the amount of time available for learning then the majority of students will achieve mastery.

thechao 3y ago
I had two of my kids in a mastery school. The school didn't "do" mastery very, well, but it's a lot better than public school. Students learn different parts of a subject at different rates. By tuning the time the kids had to learn a sub-subject, they could fully master the subject, and at an accelerated pace compare to public school. If I could get Khan-academy + peer socialization + baby sitting "in one room", I think that'd be ideal.

drhodes 3y ago

A more legible copy with selectable text: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED053419.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED053419.pdf

dang 3y ago
Ok, let's change to that from http://www.researchforteachers.org.uk/sites/default/files/Docs/Bloom%20(1968)%20Learning%20for%20Mastery_0.pdf http://www.researchforteachers.org.uk/sites/default/files/Do... above. Thanks!

gyulai 3y ago

"researchforteachers dot org dot uk" sounds like it might be an interesting organization that I'd like to know more about, but the domain root is just a login mask. Does anyone have details on who is behind and what else they offer to the general public besides a scanned PDF of an interesting article?

akoshodi 3y ago
You can do a Google/Bing search for PDFs on the domain like this: filetype:pdf site:researchforteachers.org.uk for more PDFs from the site.

begueradj 3y ago

There is also "The Improvement of the Mind" book, by Isaac Watts. It even shaped one of the great minds of science: Michael Faraday

djmips 3y ago
"Though caution and slow assent will guard you against frequent mistakes and retractions; yet you should get humility and courage enough to retract any mistake, and confess an error." - it took me a while to figure this one out on my own...

trane_project 3y ago

My implementation of mastery learning (along with other related ideas): https://github.com/trane-project/trane/ https://github.com/trane-project/trane/ It bothered me enough that there was not something like this already available, when the idea seemed so simple, that I ended up doing it myself. The user experience is not very polished yet, but I managed to turn the courses in here https://improviseforreal.com/learning-materials https://improviseforreal.com/learning-materials into courses for this software that can teach you ear training and to improvise on any instrument in all keys, all modes, and most common chord progression. Currently, I am doing it for piano, but I've only reached about 15% of the total jam tracks so far. Obviously, I am not distributing the tracks myself. I am pretty sure the main issue is that there's no one funding implementing these ideas. We've known about mastery learning, spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. for decades, but it's not all been put together into a coherent system. Something like https://mathacademy.com/ https://mathacademy.com/ is similar, but it's not open sourced and cannot be used to create your own materials. No need for LLMs or anything fancier to be involved when there's so much low-hanging fruit that's not been implemented yet. The core of my software is just a depth-first search over a graph, lol.

cglee 3y ago

I'm embarrassed to say that even after spending nearly a decade operating a mastery-based software engineering school, I've only just heard about this paper now. And having read it just now, I'm feeling better than ever about mastery-based education. Here's our take on mastery if anyone is interested: https://medium.com/launch-school/mastery-based-learning-209540907760 https://medium.com/launch-school/mastery-based-learning-2095...